Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments

Intelligent environments and smart applications require creating engaging interactions with their users, which on one side requires sensing and understanding human behavior, and on the other side carefully engineered application interfaces to keep these interactions sustained and useful over longer periods. Playful interactions and serious games incorporate elements of play for this purpose. As a fundamental human activity, play engages people at every age. This thematic issue explores how novel technologies can fuel fun and entertainment in ambient intelligence applications, and the societal implications and possibilities thereof.

The development of ambient play environments provides an opportunity to develop tangible play solutions to stimulate social and physical play by embedding responsiveness tailored and adjusted to player behaviour in the environment. This paper gives an overview of different perspectives on play and translates this theoretical knowledge from different disciplines to design relevant knowledge. The design relevant knowledge is presented in the form of a design toolkit, called the lenses of play, including the perspectives of forms of play, open-ended play, stages of play and playful experiences. Application of the design toolkit is illustrated in relation to two interactive play design cases to emphasize the design relevance of the knowledge in the design process. Furthermore, it shows how the lenses can inform different types of design decisions, such as early scoping of the design space by focusing on a form of play and making more detailed design decisions later when considering different stages of play.

Childhood health issues related to sedentary behavior have risen dramatically over the last 20 years. One of the key factors in this rise is that children are increasingly spending more time on sedentary leisure activities such as game consoles and the Internet. Research turned to interactive exertion interfaces, or exergames, to try to compensate for the lack of physical activity in children and teenagers. Part of this research, especially in HCI, has focused on game design to truly guarantee that children are motivated to play with exergames and hence increase physical activity. Other research, essentially medical, has focused on determining whether these existing exergames foster sufficiently high levels of physical activity as recommended by health experts and compared to sports activity. An important part of research, which has almost not been addressed, is that of finding an automated system to control the amount of physical activity (APA). Such system would ultimately allow health and physical education experts to draw intensity curves for play sessions to guarantee that children perform a healthy activity. Such system clearly needs a way to control this APA. We have defined a game system variable, dubbed Interaction Tempo, which has been empirically proven to be directly related to the APA performed by children in an exergame platform we have designed, the Interactive Slide. In this paper we define and justify what Interaction Tempo is and how it is related to the game control system. We describe two studies (independent factorial designs) that we have designed and undertaken with over 420 children. Our current results do not quantify the APA performed by children in an absolute manner. This will be part of future stages of our research with the support of medical experts and relating APA to Energy Expenditure. However, we have now proven that we can control and modulate the change in APA through the change in Interaction Tempo. These results provide a solid ground on which to design new exergames, as well as the underlying mechanism for developing adaptive systems that automatically control gameplay. This way the APA will always be at the level defined by physical education or health experts for the duration of a play session.

Playful interactions facilitate the development of engaging applications for different purposes. This aspect is very important for serious games, and especially when these games are for children. Another aspect to consider is the interaction among children, which could be a great reinforcement in learning environments. Children enjoy playing, and they like playing with other children. This relationship could encourage their motivation and their learning outcomes. In this paper, a playful interaction system for learning about a period of history is presented. The interaction of the system was achieved using natural gestures and the visualization was autostereoscopic. A study was carried out to determine whether their learning outcomes were greater playing collaboratively or playing individually. Forty six children from 7 to 10 years old participated in the study. The analysis of the pre-tests and the post-tests indicate that the children increased their knowledge about historical periods after playing with the two modes. Therefore, the game could be used as an effective transmitter of knowledge both collaboratively and individually. When the post-knowledge scores for the two modes were compared, statistically significant differences were found in favor of the collaborative mode. Therefore, the collaborative mode facilitates learning to a greater extent than the individual mode. The rest of the questions indicated that the children had a lot of fun while playing the game; they found the game easy to play; they would recommend the game to their friends; and they scored the game as a mean of 9.57 over 10. Finally, we believe that the combination of playful interaction and autostereoscopy is an option that should be exploited not only for the development of computer-supported learning systems, but also for the development of systems for different purposes.

This paper discusses the evocative power and play value of the Wearable Sounds Kit (WSK), a movement-to-sound interaction accessory. Whilst movement-to-sound interaction is attracting growing research attention in HCI, very little of it has been conducted in the context of free-play with children. This paper presents a participatory design study of the WSK with 20 school-aged children (7–12 years old) in a free-play scenario, and an evaluation of the WSK in a playground at Ars Electronica Festival with over 70 school-aged children. The evaluation addressed three research questions: can school-aged children incorporate the WSK into their free-play? What free-play patterns are encouraged by the WSK? Which design features of the WSK influence the free-play experience? By conducting qualitative and quantitative data gathering methods and analyses, which include first-hand observations and video-coding, this paper shows that school-aged children can effectively incorporate the WSK into their free-play, and that the accessory encourages different types of free-play. The results also show differences in the free-play mediated by the accessory depending on the age group and sex of the player, and these differences reinforce the play value of the WSK. Some implications for designing technologically-oriented playful toys are also discussed.

The present article summarizes the doctoral dissertation of Miguel S. Familiar.