Supporting Early Design Exploration of Mixed and Augmented Reality Experiences

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Speaker
Blair MacIntyre
College of Computing, Georgia Tech

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Over the past six years, my research group has been exploring the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) as a medium for creating dramatic experiences. Our research has three integrated thrusts; creating compelling experiences, understanding the design process used to create such experiences, and creating tools to support the exploration and evaluation of AR experiences. In this talk, I will touch upon all three aspects of our work. The focus of our technical work is an AR prototyping environment called DART (the Designer’s Augmented Reality Toolkit). DART is built on top of Macromedia Director, a widely used multimedia development environment. DART is freely available on our web site and is being used by designers both at Georgia Tech and throughout the world.

I will summarize a collection of problems faced by designers working with AR in the real world, and discuss how DART addresses them. Our work focuses on supporting early design activities, especially a rapid transition from storyboards to working experience, so that the experiential part of a design can be tested early and often. DART allows designers to specify complex relationships between the physical and virtual worlds, and supports 3D animatic actors (informal, sketch-based content) in addition to more polished content. Designers can capture and replay synchronized video and sensor data, allowing them to work off-site and to test specific parts of their experience more effectively, as well as supporting a form of editable video prototyping. Extensive Wizard-of-Oz support allows complex experiences to be developed and tested incrementally.

Throughout the talk, I will draw on experiences we have developed, including “Four Angry Men” (an AR version of the movie/play “Twelve Angry Men”) and “The Voices of Oakland” (an audio-AR walking tour of Atlanta’s historic Oakland Cemetery).

Speaker's Bio

Dr. Blair MacIntyre is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He directs the Augmented Environments Lab, and is an active member of the GVU Center. He is the College of Computing faculty advisor to the Computational Media program, a joint undergraduate degree between Computing and the School of Literature, Communication and Culture (LCC). The work discussed here is supported by an NSF CAREER grant, and is part of an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Jay Bolter in LCC. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1998, and MMath and BMath degrees from the University of Waterloo in 1991 and 1989.