CAREER:Supporting Design Exploration, Prototyping and Testing of Creative Augmented Reality Experiences

该项目将探索增强现实(AR)在艺术和设计中的创造性使用的早期设计支持。其主要目标是通过使设计师能够直接使用AR作为戏剧性体验的新媒介来推动最先进的技术。PI将识别和支持AR体验的适当设计活动，创建支持这些活动的设计工具，并解决支持这些工具创建的基本技术问题。这项研究的具体体现将是一个名为DART(设计者增强现实工具包)的系统，其主要影响将是增加对体验式AR系统的设计和创建过程的理解，这为创造就地教育和戏剧体验提供了巨大的希望。为此，PI将专注于两个设计活动：使用非正式内容促进反思性设计的快速原型制作，以及使用绿野仙踪模拟进行体验测试。这项工作的主要贡献将是理解在纸质故事板和完整的工作体验之间的空间中支持原型所必需的计算抽象。PI认为，在真实物理空间中处理“计算活跃”的非正式内容是快速设计体验式AR系统的关键，而处理物理世界和虚拟世界之间的交互是AR设计与其他交互系统设计的不同之处。PI希望他将创建的AR技术和设计工具将提供必要的脚手架，使研究人员和领域专家都能够推动应用程序设计的极限。对任何AR应用领域感兴趣的设计师都将从快速制作他们的想法原型的能力中受益匪浅，DART将扩展Macromedia Director，这是创作多媒体内容的事实上的标准，以支持AR体验的设计、测试和部署。除了AR社区，这个项目中开发的工具将对任何涉及模拟或物理空间的非AR设计师有用，例如VR、戏剧制作、建筑可视化或城市规划，即使最终内容不会使用透明HMD交付。PI打算自由分配在这个项目中创造的技术，以授权给广大设计师，他们因为设备的昂贵和使用技术的困难而无法在这些新媒体中追求自己的兴趣。这项研究还将为那些本科生和研究生(媒体研究、计算机和其他学科，如建筑和工业设计)提供一种新颖的教育体验，他们将在PI的课堂上和自己的研究项目中，在多学科项目团队中共同工作。PI还打算探索如何使用DART向非CS学生教授一些入门计算概念。

This project will explore early design support for creative uses of augmented reality (AR) in the arts and design. The primary goal is to advance the state of the art by enabling designers to work directly with AR as a new medium for dramatic experiences. The PI will identify and support appropriate design activities for AR experiences, create design tools that support these activities, and solve the fundamental technical problems to support the creation of these tools. The tangible manifestation of this research will be a system called DART (the Designers Augmented Reality Toolkit), and the primary impact will be increased understanding of the design and creation process of experiential AR systems, which offer tremendous promise for creating in-situ educational and dramatic experiences.To these ends, the PI will focus on two design activities: rapid prototyping using informal content to promote reflective design, and experience testing using Wizard-of-Oz simulation. A primary contribution of this work will be to understand the computational abstractions necessary to support prototyping in the space between paper storyboards and fully working experiences. The PI believes that working with "computationally active" informal content in real physical spaces is the key to rapid design of experiential AR systems, and that dealing with the interactions between the physical and virtual worlds is what distinguishes AR design from other interactive system design. The PI expects the AR technologies and design tools he will create will provide the scaffolding necessary to allow both researchers and domain experts to push the limits of application design. Designers interested in any AR application domain will benefit greatly from the ability to rapidly prototype their ideas, and DART will extend Macromedia Director, the de facto standard for authoring multimedia content, to support the design, testing and deployment of AR experiences.Broader Impact. Beyond the AR community, the tools to be developed in this project will be useful to non-AR designers in any field that involves simulated or physical space, such as VR, theater production, architectural visualization, or urban planning, even if the final content will not be delivered using see-through HMDs. The PI intends to freely distribute the technology created in this project, so as to empower a broad class of designers who have been unable to pursue their interests in these new media because of the expense of equipment and the difficulty in using the technology. The research will also provide a novel educational experience to those undergraduate and graduate students (in Media Studies, Computing and other disciplines such as Architecture and Industrial Design) who will be working together in the multi-disciplinary project teams in the PI's classes and on their own research projects. The PI further intends to explore how DART might be used for teaching some introductory computing concepts to non-CS students.