Ambient Audio for Location-Based Augmented-Reality Games

Mobile games such as Pokémon Go allow players to navigate the real world as part of gameplay. The world is augmented by the appearance of monsters that the player can catch. When played on a small, hand-held display, location-based games such as Pokémon Go have two problems: users may be distracted, possibly leading to accidents; and players must map the display contents to the physical world, possibly reducing their sense of immersion. In this paper, we present the results of a study showing that ambient audio - a continuous stream of audio representing an entity in space - can replace visual displays for navigation tasks in location-based games. We find that ambient audio reduces player performance, but increases their sense of immersion in the virtual world and increases player safety.

For more information

Jason Kurczak, T.C. Nicholas Graham, Claire Joly and Regan L. Mandryk, Hearing is Believing: Evaluating Ambient Audio for Location-Based Games, in Proceedings of ACE 2011, pp. 1-8, 2011

Jason Kurczak and T.C. Nicholas Graham, TREC: Platform-Neutral Input for Mobile Augmented Reality Applications, in Proceedings of EICS 2011, pp. 283-288, 2011

Team

Jason Kurczak, Claire Joly, Jonathan Segel, Nick Graham, Regan Mandryk