Mobile Augmented Reality as an Orientation Aid: A Scavenger Hunt Prototype

Abstract

Orientation in public environments is a critical skill for new arrivals, yet also one that is usually only learned gradually through trial and error. This paper suggests the use of pervasive augmented reality (AR) for the design of a serious game that teaches navigational skills in a public environment. Many AR scavenger hunt games confront players with new environments by default, however they rarely focus explicitly on teaching navigational skills. We propose a concept that utilises augmented reality techniques for increased immersion and motivation, while upholding the real-world sense of presence for an easy transfer of orientation skills to everyday life. For this purpose, we implemented a first prototypical serious game in the form of an AR scavenger hunt. A preliminary evaluation regarding its usability produced promising results. As such, the prototype constitutes a first proof of concept. In future iterations, it will be further developed as an adaptive AR serious game, and evaluated in respect to its efficacy in teaching orientation and navigation skills.

Mobile Educational Augmented Reality Games: A Systematic Literature Review and Two Case Studies

“…Most EMARGs were created for primary school children, to be used in informal pedagogical settings, such as in science centers [61], libraries [60], in nature [41,49,56] or in museums [39,40], thus demonstrating how augmented content can enrich situated learning [64] experiences in authentic contexts. A few games targeted at higher education [57,63] or lifelong learners (i.e., any age group) [50,54,59]. The EMARGS that are marked as having formal contexts were created for and evaluated in classroom environments; however, many of them are context-independent and therefore can be played in anywhere (e.g., at home).…”

“…This, however, does not rule out competition. For example, there were several competitive single-player games that were played alone, but achievements (e.g., points) were shared and compared against those of other players [37,38,49,60,63]. Most multi-player games were cooperative and some had competitive features as well.…”

Academic methods for usability evaluation of serious games: a systematic review

“…We found four main categories: (1) Learning [3, 4, 12, 15-17, 19, 27, 28, 37-40, 47, 55, 60, 67, 68, 71, 76, 77, 85, 86, 93, 98, 100, 102, 104, 109, 115, 120, 128, 131, 137, 146, 147, 149, 167, 174, 176, 178, 179, 185, 188, 191, 197, 200, 201, 203-206, 210, 212, 217, 218, 223, 225, 227, 229, 239, 240, 242-244, 251, 253, 259], including formal or informal approaches; (2) Health [5, 6, 10, 18, 23, 29, 32, 45, 48, 52, 56-58, 66, 69, 72, 73, 79, 87, 91, 92, 94, 99, 103, 114, 119, 121, 127, 130, 140, 159, 162, 169, 173, 180, 183, 184, 186, 195, 213, 214, 216, 222, 226, 231-233, 238, 245, 247-249, 255], which can be divided into the categories shown in Fig. 3; (3) Accessibility [152,161,202,207,221], including any game that is not in the previous categories and focuses on the inclusion of people with sensory impairments; and ( 4 189,190,193,199,208,228,230,234,235,237,250,254,256,258], which serves as a miscellanea category, where we included analysis of networked commercial games or mobile games that did not pay attention to any of the previous specific areas. This final group of tests included training tools for aircraft pilots, design tools for architects or engineers and analysis of famous commercial games, among others.…”