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Sascha Oberhuber, Tina Kothe, Stefan Schneegass, Florian Alt
Augmented Games - Exploring Design Opportunities in AR Settings With Children
In IDC 2017: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interaction Design for Children. Stanford, CA, USA, June 27-30, 2017. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (bib)

In this paper we investigate how Augmented Reality (AR) technology influences children during creative content generation in playful settings. The work is motivated by the recent spread of AR and the fact that children get in touch with this technology through their smart phones very early on. To understand the consequences, we implemented an app for smart mobile devices that allows children to create treasure hunts using GPS coordinates and marker-based AR functionality. During a qualitative user study, we asked students (n=27) to create traditional (paper + art supplies) and digital (paper + art supplies + AR app) treasure hunts and compared the resulting games, among other metrics, in terms of complexity, length and types of media used. Whereas traditional treasure hunts were linear, centered around locations and delivered information with text only, digital treasure hunts were more complex, focused on visual aspects and frequently integrated storytelling.