This article is an short overview of the neXus project, Pieter Diepenmaat's master thesis project in Industrial Design Engineering at Hewlett Packard Labs and the IDStudiolab at Delft Technical University. A comprehensive overview of the project can be found in the downloadable version of the neXus’ HP tech report.
Take a look at pages from
the neXus thesis
When designing a mediascape device from a user centered perspective, it soon becomes clear that the overall mediascape experience is what is of importance to the user. Take a tourist on an interactive tour of Amsterdam for instance. While walking along the canals, she receives stories from her device about her current surroundings. It tells of events that took place there in the heydays of Amsterdam’s wealth in the 17th century, but also gives insights into the current day city.
If the interactive tour was designed poorly, she would undergo an unpleasant experience, regardless of how well the device was designed. On the other hand, a badly designed device limits the possibilities of experiencing a mediascape to the fullest, while a well-designed device makes it easy for the user to interact with the interactive content and potentially opens up additional mediascape design possibilities to the mediascape author. This is where the developers have some control: the device itself, the content (the mediascape) and the technological infrastructure (i.e. all parts that can be designed) can be carefully developed and manufactured. Yet there are many aspects, contextual as well as subjective, that influence a mediascape experience over which developers have little to no control. Predicting what will be happening around a visitor during a mediascape experience is very difficult. Well-designed mediascapes do make an educated guess on the most likely state of the visitors surroundings by getting to know the location of the mediascape well. Observing how context conditions like the predominant weather, reoccurring events and the type of people present change over time allows the developers to make the mediascape change based on its context of use. Still, not knowing the visitor’s exact context, let alone their thoughts and feelings means the experience can not be fully controlled or designed.
To realize the project’s aim to design a device that is an integral part of such compelling but complex experiences, current examples had to be understood from a user-centered perspective. In getting from understanding the experiences to designing a fitting device, the first step was to collect and categorize the many different existing mediascapes. This is important because when developing a dedicated device, an obvious trap is to design a device that tries to facilitate all of these (possible) mediascapes to all potential visitors. Such a general device will most likely facilitate none of the mediascapes very well. Consequently, a dedicated device should only provide for the experience of some of the mediascapes.
Therefore, the broad range of mediascape experiences was grouped on the basis of similar interaction models. An interaction model describes what the visitor needs to do to experience a particular mediascape to the fullest. Mediascape experiences with similar interaction models were labeled “genres”. This led to the following mediascape genres, for each of which a dedicated device could potentially be developed:
Because it is undesirable to develop a device that tries to suit the whole range of possible mediascape experiences, the project concentrated on the development of a dedicated device particularly suited for one example genre; Location Based Games (LBGs). Compared to the other genres LBGs offer the most dynamic and interactive mixed reality experiences. Developing a dedicated LBG device, like the neXus, therefore explores a rich collection of interactions that is useful to all genres. Not just interactions between a player and his device or between a player and the virtual part of the mediascape, but also between players or teams of players.
The current mediascape experiences were also researched to find what made them appealing to the visitors. Any dedicated device attempting to be an integral part of compelling mediascape experiences needs to facilitate its attractions. User research conducted by HP-Labs and others helped to identify many different attractions. Some specific to one genre, others present in most experiences. The key attractions any dedicated mediascape device needs to facilitate are:
The key (additional) attractions of LBGs:
So in order to be an integral part of compelling mediascape experiences, the neXus is optimized for one particular genre of mediascapes; LBGs. The neXus facilitates the key attractions of mediascape experiences in general and of LBGs specifically. But although these attractions will remain largely the same within the next five years, we will next see how technology developments will have a major impact on the design of both the mediascapes and the devices that can be used to experience them.
