Situated Research's Blog

For years, the sophisticated play of professional teams trickled down to their college and high school counterparts. Recently, that flow has been reversed. Read more »

Custom-Built Virtual Lecture Hall Provides Fuqua School of Business Students With Access to World’s Most Influential Leaders and Extends Classroom Environment Read more »

Virtual saleswoman and other technology changing how we work, play, shop

Our avatars are coming. Those mobile and 3-D and interactive technologies being created around us are about to beam us into a new world, filled with workday holograms, avatars and stuff we called magic only a few years ago. Read more »

This list of ten features should be embraced by game designers

Steve Krug argues in his book Don’t Make Me Think! that a good program or product should let users accomplish their intended tasks as easily and directly as possible. The less time it takes a person to complete a desired task (even if only by a few seconds), the more satisfying it becomes. When that happens, people are more likely to use a product in greater frequency and return for more. So in the spirit of improved usability, here are ten standard features every videogame designer should embrace. Read more »

Behind the scenes at Weta Digital, where creativity meets cutting-edge science

James Cameron has spent the better part of a decade developing the technology used to create Avatar.

Back in 1996, James Cameron announced that he would be creating a film called Avatar, a science-fiction epic that would feature photo-realistic, computer-generated characters. Read more »

Games such as Mindflex use headsets with simple electrodes to monitor levels of concentration and relaxation.

(CNN) — In the shimmering fantasy realm of the hit movie Avatar, a paraplegic Marine leaves his wheelchair behind and finds his feet in a new virtual world thanks to “the link,” a sophisticated chamber that connects his brain to a surrogate alien, via computer. Read more »

Games are a wonderful medium. Like music, literature, film and theatre, games do a great deal to help make life worth living. In Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde said, “All art is quite useless.” He said this to illustrate that yes, art has little to no practical value. That does not mean that art is of no benefit to anyone of course! For me, the same argument can be applied to games, as their entertainment value is enough to justify their existence.

Critics of games however are full of concerns about violence, addiction and distractions from what the establishment regards as “more meaningful” pursuits. These being reading, watching films or punching someone in the face in a bar… Read more »

Can’t find your Nintendo DS? Try one of the new Adidas sneakers instead.

Adidas has created a virtual 3-D world that can be accessed using an upcoming line of five men’s sneakers in an idea that ties into one of the technology trends of the year: augmented reality.

“The foundation of augmented reality lies in adding a layer to the real world,” says Chris Barbour, head of digital marketing for Adidas Originals. “That’s what we have done. We have taken a real world item and added a fantastic virtual world on top of that”

All users have to do is go to the Adidas site and hold up their sneaker, which has a code embedded in its tongue, in front of their computer webcam. A virtual world then pops out in front of them and they can navigate it using their sneaker as a controller. Read more »

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ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2009) — Although often seen as an inconsequential feature of digital technologies, one’s self-representation, or avatar, in a virtual environment can affect the user’s thoughts, according to research by a University of Texas at Austin communication professor. Read more »

Lynn Marentette has just reported, hot off the press from Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group at UIST 2009.

MS presents novel input devices that combine the standard capabilities of a computer mouse with multi-touch sensing. The goal is to make multi-touch interaction more widely available and applicable to the desktop environment. To chart the design space, they present five different multi-touch mouse implementations. Each explores a different touch sensing strategy, which leads to differing form-factors and hence interactive possibilities.

The following video is courtesy of Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group:

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Matthew Sharritt, President of Situated Research, recently created a brochure giving an overview of our video game user-experience research:

Situated Research: Video Game User-Experience Analysis (PDF)

Please feel free to download, view, print, and redistribute this brochure to others! We have a unique talent to help game developers create better games, and we need your help getting the message out there so people know about us. Read more »

Serious games occupy the training-based category of game development products. Serious games are utilitarian and goal-oriented, offering the user protocol-driven functional engagement, acknowledgment of task achievements, and almost zero entertainment value or fluff (outside of the necessary local and peripheral “traffic” caused by natural interaction with other life and environmental elements – human, animal, plant, mechanical, and weather). Serious games subject matter is typically taught to employees-in-training, re-assigned employees, or emergency preparedness / non-profit volunteers within any line of work, from leadership to trench-level roles. That learned material is, then, put to use in real world employment or deployment scenarios, from how to properly drain and dispose of vegetable oil from a fish-and-chips fryer to how to properly disassemble, diagnose, and repair the turbines on a military helicopter. Read more »