Meeting with Narcis Pares

Yesterday, I had a meeting with Narcis Pares, from the Interactive Communication Experimentation Group at the UPF. I know him from Anna Carreras, a PhD student at the UPF interested in educational uses of virtual reality and who worked on MEDIATE.

MEDIATE, a work by Narcis’ group, tries to tend a multi-sensorial bridge to the interaction of autistic children and the world surrounding them.

I presented CatchBob! and my research scope on spatial uncertainty in ubiquitous computing.

I had to define clearly what aspect of uncertainty I focus on. I made the difference between uncertainty due to miscommunications and technological limitations. Then defined the different sources of the spatial uncertainty in location-aware environments.

Narcis went on questioning the potential bias in my data. How much of the uncertainty is coming from the system and how much from the game. According to him, the game lacks of some basic rules. The boundaries of the game are not define in some cases, and the player does not know what to expect. Reactions should be matched with certain rules. That is if there are fuzzy zone, then the player should know about the fuzziness (get an impression of the cold spots). Catchbob! players are like footballers playing on a field without lines. I argumented that the real world is like that (mentioning example of taxi drivers and GPS). One way for him to get better data, would be to setup and experiment in which the uncertainty is controlled.

He told me to think about what is under the control of the system, the user and neither. Giving me the example of one of his experiment in which the system had to support both 3rd person and 1st person interaction. In the third person interaction, the sensors tracked the shadow of user without the user noticing. So the shadow is neither under the control of the system neither the user.

Finally, does CatchBob! provide physical support for a virtual game? (related to the questions on the potential bias)