Chuck Clanton||Jon Fox · Aratar
Interactive Body Gestures for Public Multiplayer Games and Toys

You need Flash player 8+ and JavaScript enabled to view this video.

Reactrix had a profitable interactive media network connecting 185 interactive floor displays ("floor reactors") in malls and theaters nationwide Every day, the network delivered millions of multi-user interactions with games, toys and advertisements. We did dozens of studies to answer questions about how to attract and keep players, and how to create memorable experiences. Our design best practices combined principles from cognitive psychology with principles from game design that I had developed at Electronic Arts while working on four best-seller games. In 2005, we commissioned a large Arbitron study to validate our effectiveness. It found that the floor Reactor had 3x the brand recall of the best results from any other medium they had ever studied, and 20x the message recall, along with high return rates, word of mouth, and praise for the experience. Having cracked the code for fun and compelling game and toy interactions on the floor, in 2006 we were ready to build a wall reactor using a large plasma TV display and a 3D camera system similar to today's xBox Kinect. We began a 2 year research program to establish a gesture language and best practices for designing fun and compelling interactions in front of the display. We evolved a 3-zone system with different goals and interaction styles for each zone: a far zone to attract players, an interaction zone for play and navigation, and a "too-close" zone to move them back into the interaction zone. Observers greatly outnumber players in public gaming, so we kept players away from the wall display to support the view of the observers. Throughout our research, we designed our experiments as carefully as our games. We built realistic testing environments in order to simulate the task-orientation and physical environment of the typical mall. One environment resembled an educational chocolate gallery in a warehouse. This installation had a wall reactor and a non-interactive TV display and our subjects were asked to go through the experience on their own so we could gauge their reactions to the 2 different displays. Based on this work, we then tested the wall reactor in two different malls and a hotel lobby. Unfortunately, Reactrix was torpedoed in the market crash of 2008, so the results of our research has only been seen by a few thousand mall-goers. In this talk, we will present a few of our more interesting findings on full body multiplayer interactions. We will describe how to get messaging and information to stick in intense interactive environments and why it usually doesn't. We will also describe how we successfully mixed an interactive attract mode with compelling play interactions in an update of old arcade game consoles, and we will talk about how we did intuitive multiplayer play with natural body gestures that did not depend on keeping track of players or reliably identifying connections between arms and bodies. Having cracked the code for fun and compelling game and toy interactions on the floor, in 2006 we were ready to build a wall reactor using a large plasma TV display and a 3D camera. We began a 2 year research program to establish a gesture language and best practices for designing fun and compelling interactions on the wall. We evolved a 3-zone system with different goals and interaction styles for each zone: a far zone to attract players, an interaction zone for play, and a close zone to move them back into the interaction zone. (Observers greatly outnumber players on floor reactors, so we wanted to keep players in the interaction zone away from the wall display to better support observers.) We did most of our initial testing in an educational chocolate gallery we built in a warehouse. It had a wall reactor and a non-interactive TV display showing similar media in order to simulate the mall environment with active passerbys. As our research progressed, we developed more sophisticated interactions and took our testing into two different malls. Unfortunately, Reactrix was torpedoed in the market crash of 2008, so that the results of our research has only been seen by a few thousand mall-goers. In this talk, we will present a few of our more interesting findings on full body multiplayer interactions .

Dr. Chuck spent a number of years designing the user experience for serious software applications. One day, he realized that much of what he had learned years earlier in film school about the visual language of the screen was not well known in the HCI community. So, he developed a tutorial, Film Craft for User Interface Design, that he taught at a well-attended tutorial at SIGCHI and SIGGRAPH for several years, as well as a course at Stanford. During this time, he was asked to create highly animated game-like interactions to support the development of a new language that was eventually named Java. In the process, he worked with game producers and became interested in what game designers knew that was also not known to the HCI community. He got a job in the game industry and ended up as Studio Lead Designer at Electronic Art's UK Studio and became the first Design Fellow at Electronic Arts. He worked on the design of four best-selling games, including the first lead game designer on the first Harry Potter game. After returning to the USA, he taught a class at Stanford on lessons from game design for user experience designers which also was presented as a SIGCHI tutorial. He co-designed avatar-centric communication and other design elements of the Emmy-award winning virtual world, There. He joined Reactrix as Director of User Experience Design where he did the research to develop design best practices for their interactive floor and wall displays. In the last few years, he has worked on the Kung Fu Panda and VIE virtual worlds, as well as several serious software applications with interesting visualization and control challenges. Jon is a seasoned business strategist with 15 years of interactive multimedia development, a wealth of international experience and a track record of helping companies advance from start-up through merger and acquisition. Jon was Executive Producer, responsible for directing content production, programming, and ad operations. His CV includes Producer and Director of over 200 videos and online events, founder and CTO of one of the first streaming media companies, and tech-cowboy/pioneer in "against-all-odds" webcasting, connecting technologically challenged environments such as West Africa's Sahara and Burning Man's Black Rock City to the Web. Jon helped design and constructed the "chocolate gallery" research environment for Reactrix, managed the creation of research media, and managed the research operations. He is now a managing partner at Helios Inteactive Technologies, where he designs and manages the installation of interactive brand experiences using cutting edge technologies such as 3D depth sensing cameras, Augmented Reality, and large multitouch screens.