Steven Dow - Understanding User Engagement in Immersive and Interactive Stories

Steven Dow is a Postdoctoral Scholar working in the HCI Group at Stanford University and currently investigating the cognitive and social effects of media and tools on design thinking. He earned his PhD in 2008 and his MS in 2004 from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Today, Steven talked about his dissertation, Understanding User Engagement in Immersive and Interactive Stories, and shared with us his empirical observations and the psychological concept that he explored of user engagement through an immersive and interactive story experience called AR Façade.

Façade is a desktop-based interactive drama authored by Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas. It's then developed and installed with an augmented reality (AR) interface that allowed for unconstrained body movement and speech communication. Therefore, in the AR Façade experience, players could move freely around, as well as use gesture and speech to interact with an animated married couple. They would find themselves in the middle of a marital conflict and could influence how the social scenario played out through their actions and statements.

To evaluate user experience, Steve intended to examine how a media experience changed when going from traditional desktop interaction to immersive augmented reality. He had 45 participants playtested and being interviewed. To analyze this vast quantity of interview and play data, he conducted four primary analyses: Qualitative interview analysis, player profile analysis, episode analysis, and log analysis. His studies indicated, even though the AR interface increased most guests' sense of *presence* (immersiveness) over the PC version, but this did not necessary lead to fun and engagement.

After the presentation, I chatted with Steven regarding design and analysis of human-computer interaction. Sonology, the prior ETC project that I worked on, also had an interactive device with trackers attached on players so that they could interact with the virtual environment. Yet the team were strongly engaged in tech development, we found ourselves consistently interested in observing human perception, how it affected our guests' movements in the virtual worlds, and how we improved our system based on their reactions. This also reflected what we've seen in Steven's thesis. Sometimes we assumed the high technology would lead us into entertainment or convenience; we assumed we would always appreciate the evolution of technology. Nevertheless, we forgot it's often not *computer* but *human* that we should have had researched on; it's always the humanity that defines and decides the technology.