The final AREEF evaluation paper has been presented at MobileHCI 2016 in beautiful Florence. The full reference is as follows:
Oppermann, Leif, Lisa Blum, and Marius Shekow (2016)
“Playing on AREEF – Evaluation of an Underwater Augmented Reality Game for Kids”. Presented at MobileHCI, pp. 330-340 Florence, Italy
The paper can be accessed via the ACM Digital Library and Researchgate.
The last stage of the AREEF project was the user evaluation, which was carried out at the end of October 2013 by Fraunhofer FIT in Darmstadt and Siegburg, Germany. The game was tested in real conditions in a swimming pool by children between 8 and 12 years old. In the evaluation the children were first instructed to the game and were then observed while playing it from inside and outside the pool by Fraunhofer FIT researchers. Each child was finally interviewed, filling a questionnaire.
The evaluation was split into a pilot and final evaluation. The pilot evaluation took place in Darmstadt, Germany on September 30th with three children. It was not only helpful in improving the experience of the game, but also to determine the feasibility of the evaluation-plan. It allowed establishing a routine in the team, since evaluating technology with children is challenging.
The final evaluation in Siegburg was intended to take place with a much higher number of participants. The call for participants was distributed by local media on October 15th (Stadt-Anzeiger Köln, Generalanzeiger Bonn), bringing forward 36 volunteers being evaluated within one week. The evaluation was also covered by the media and aired by national television (WDR Lokalzeit, October 24th). It was also covered by print media (Stadt-Anzeiger Köln, October 25th and Bild der Wissenschaft Plus, published January 8th).
In the final evaluation a comprehensive amount of data was collected, comprised of qualitative and quantitative data from the questionnaire, and quantitative data from the game log files. Feedback from children regarding the idea and the hardware & software implementation was overwhelmingly positive. Many children asked for more virtual scenery or more play-time in upcoming versions, and the majority expressed strong interest in commercialization, since they would like to rent the AREEF system in the future.
An overview of the AREEF experience and its participatory system design process was presented at the IEEE Games Innovation Conference in Vancouver, Canada. The full reference is as follows:
Oppermann, Leif, Lisa Blum, Jun-Yeong Lee, and Jung-Hyub Seo (2013)
“AREEF: Multi-player Underwater Augmented Reality Experience”. In IEEE
Games Innovation Conference (IGIC), Vancouver, Canada
The paper can also be accessed via the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.
Just add water —
In the last few years Augmented Reality evolved from a cutting-edge niche application to a widely used technology. While Augmented Reality so far is limited to dry environments, FIT has been working on using the technology under water.
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(560 KB)Recently, the AREEF project was featured in
“The AREEF project marks the continuation of the FIT’s work in the field of underwater augmented reality which began in 2009 with the development of the world’s first prototype of a mobile underwater AR system. The focus now is on developing a fullyfledged system that is economically viable. The project is funded by the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology KIAT. Fraunhofer FIT is the first European research institute to lead a project of this kind. […]”
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(80KB) (65KB)Global Technology Collaboration – AREEF as a success story
YTN – [특집: 기술한류 – 글로벌 협력을 주도한다] — 프라운호퍼연구소와 수중증강현실 기술개발을 수행하고 있는 UD4M사 방문 및 인터뷰 내용입니다.
Links
Swimming with virtual sharks —
“Augmented Reality technology adds virtual objects to live images of the real world, in the simplest case adding a virtual ten yards line to the video of a football match. While current applications are limited to dry environments, Fraunhofer FIT works on the aquatic use of Augmented Reality.”
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(560 KB)A New Europe Special Report (March 2012) introduces AREEF
“AREEF, a Korean-German collaborative R&D project funded by the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology (KIAT) takes the idea of using AR (Augmented Reality) technology under water to a new level and is charting out how this innovation could be used for creating marketable and fun-to-use entertainment and edutainment applications for swimming pools. The project is not only working on a novel topic in itself, but it also marks a new level of Korean-European collaboration, as it is the first KIAT funded international collaborative R&D project that is led by a European partner.”
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(1,5 MB)
With AREEF being the first KIAT-funded project with a European lead-organisation (Fraunhofer FIT), we have been invited twice to speak about it as a case study for successful Korean-European cooperation at the KORRIDOR Infodays in Bonn (March 1st 2011) and Barcelona (October 6th 2011).
The presentation provides an overview of the project, as well as a summary of our experience from getting the project and some lessons learned.