Interactional Practices and Artifact Orientation in Mobile Augmented Reality Game Play
Steven L. Thorne, John Hellermann, Adam Jones, D. F. Lester · PDXScholar (Portland State University) · 2015
In an effort to better understand the ways that small groups use digital technology as they move through a physical environment, this paper describes the methods used by groups of three people to maintain a group participation structure as they accomplish a quest-type task during mobile augmented reality game play. The game was available on one mobile digital device (an Apple iPhone) that was shared by three players as they negotiated a set of point-to-point route finding tasks. Video-recordings of each group were made using three cameras (two head-mounted cameras and one hand-held camera). We focus on the different ways that the single device was oriented to by group members via talk-in-interaction as they accomplished the game activity. In particular, we outline the practices for talk-in-interaction (including gaze, postural alignment, and deictic expressions) used by the participants to maintain their constitution as a group, to accomplish a shared visual focus on the single device, and to explicitly transfer the device from one player to another.