Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Augmented reality (AR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) permit immersive experiences that span multiple rooms and wide areas, creating opportunities for locative media, including interactive stories and games, and immersive visualizations. Content creators can present characters and objects at scale and in situ, precisely placed within a room or across multiple rooms. Content creators can use physical navigation, visual unfolding, proximity and orientation, and other aspects of human spatial experience to create compelling productions. However, as content becomes more complex or covers a larger space, manual placement becomes tedious and time-consuming, and it can be challenging to consider all visual perspectives and physical approaches when designing and placing content. Content placement is even more challenging when a production is experienced in multiple locations. Spatial analysis includes a broad range of empirical, mathematical, and theoretical approaches to understanding physical space. Sophisticated tools and platforms exist to support researchers and professionals whose work concerns the physical environment, but different kinds of tools are needed to support the kinds of spatial considerations required of immersive locative AR content in a manner that suits the skillsets and workflows of content creators. The long-term objective of the proposed research program is to develop tools for content creators to help them think spatially in a manner that supports the creation of impactful locative and immersive AR content. These tools will be grounded in spatial analysis theory and practice but will be iteratively co-designed with content creators and empirically validated in terms of creative workflow and quality of output. This research program will focus on three core features of such tools as short-term objectives. These objectives follow promising design directions identified in our prior work: (1) visual approaches for integrating objective spatial data in situ and its analysis with observational data and annotations regarding human behaviour and experience within a space. (2) immersive visualization techniques that promote understanding of visual unfoldings, or how viewing and approaching from different perspectives shape the experience of a work. (3) techniques for adapting content dynamically to different spatial layouts, according to markup provided by content creators either explicitly, or indirectly by interpreting the manual placement of content on example layouts. The outcomes of this research will benefit content creators (artists, educators, community organizations, and others) who wish to employ immersive, locative AR to tell stories, create experiences, or share data. Over the course of this research program, we will connect directly with architects and planners, new media artists, educators and students, climate scientists and community organizations, who will both shape our designs and use the outputs of our work.