The World-as-Support: embodied exploration, understanding and meaning-making of the augmented world

The World-as-Support: embodied exploration, understanding and meaning-making of the augmented world

Affiliation: Tenure Associate Professor in the ICT Department (DTIC) of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain)

Place: Large Lecture Room

The rich opportunities offered by the blending of the digital and the material worlds have become a mainstream research field in HCI. From a broad perspective, this hybrid space embraces both research oriented toward using the physical world to interact with digital technology (i.e. embodied interaction) as well as studies aimed at digitally augmenting the physical environment through Augmented/Mixed Reality (ARMR).

Nowadays the most widespread technological configurations for ARMR systems are based on smartphones and tablet devices. Most of these applications are designed accordingly to the Window-on-the-World (WoW) interaction paradigm. In contrast to this approach, we identify a novel and emerging conceptual paradigm to design ARMR applications for mobile technologies. We call this novel approach the World-as-Support (WaS) interaction paradigm. This paradigm allows users to augment the physical surroundings by projecting the digital information on the physical world and it permits to combine ARMR with the possibilities offered by embodied interaction.

We will  present the features and potential of this novel paradigm. Furthermore, we will report and discuss a preliminary study aimed at comparing the WoW and WaS paradigms in the context of educational technologies.