Apparition & Crowdsourcing: Designing the Future of Creative Gaming
Photo Credit: Life on Azeroth via photopin (license)
Imagine this:
After a long day, you come home, turn on your computer, laptop, or tablet, open an easy to use design program, sketch out and verbally explain a character, its actions, and a little of its environment, and—10 seconds later—begin playing your newly created game prototype. Pretty awesome, right?
Well, thanks to a handful of dedicated researchers, the Apparition system may quickly turn this fantasy into reality.
After 20 years of program remodeling, Apparition plans on presenting its prospective customers with “Wizard-of-Oz” service—a term used when users believe an application is automated when it is actually fully (or partially) managed by hired professionals. By employing on-demand, self-coordinated crowdsource workers, Apparition users (also defined as end-users) will soon have the ability to watch their gaming ideas come to life right before their eyes.
Here are some quick, background facts on Apparition:
The entire Apparition system can be operated on mostly any device as long as it has a web browser; however, it is not available on mobile devices.
Audio is recorded using Adobe Media Server to capture additional information about a project which cannot be entirely sketched [eg animations/movements].
The drawing canvas, which is utilized by the user as well as the crowdsource workers, is a custom-made version of SVG-Edit (a quick vector graphics editor), similar to Google Draw. It synchronizes the customer with Apparition’s tech-savvy designers, editors, and animators.
Sketching requires a stylus pen and tablet or a typical computer mouse. (Most outline elements can be automatically recognized by the system.)
Only takes 8 seconds to: convert sketches to solid features, design, remove, or resize items, change an item’s position or color etc.
Animating characters or backgrounds can be accomplished by adding, moving, or removing elements to and from the original canvas. Users can choose to verbally explain the actions they’d like to see –OR—they could choose to authorize a webcam stream to demonstrate specific movements for the animation team.
Only takes 3 seconds to: place the correct elements, establish coloration, apply movement, determine how direct interaction effects visibility etc.
The Apparition system contains sketching and verbal tools to enhance and advance the prototype creation process as a whole.
So—now that we have discussed some basic details of Apparition—how does the system manage to coordinate workers behind the scenes?
Similar to Apparition’s end-users, crowdworkers are provided with a digital canvas; however, to keep tabs on designing and programming roles, workers also utilize coordination tools which the end-user cannot see. Since there are fewer than ten individuals privately working on a project, assigned workers are trained to designate by color what aspect(s) they are willing to complete from a system generated to-do list, which is compiled automatically by Apparition (deciphers original user’s sketches and verbal cues).
The researchers behind Apparition state that in the future they would like to present crowdworkers with tools to automatically upgrade the prototype system to accelerate the creation process. For example, if a user is satisfied with a prototype, then he/she could request a polished version by selecting “bake in” mode—where the user goes offline and Apparition automatically creates multiple copies of the specified model. Once completed, these copies are then sent to a random group of crowdworkers who select the best polished copy to send to the end-user. Another goal for the team is to study how real-world users react to and impact the design processes of Apparition.
So what's the bottom line about this intelligent, prototyping system?
By quickly and efficiently keeping up with users’ sketched and verbal requests, Apparition can generate prototypes that are over 90% accurate in 8 seconds thanks to six phenomenal researchers from Standford University, the University of Rochester, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon University.
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Source: Lasecki, Walter S, Kim J., Rafter N., Sen O., Bigham J., & Bernstein M. (2015). “Apparition: Crowdsourced User Interfaces that Come to Life as You Sketch Them.” CHI ’15 Proceedings of the 33 Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems, p. 1925-1934. http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2015/apparition/apparition-CHI2015.pdf
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