WozARd seminar in Karlstad

Günter Alce, who recently defended a licentiate thesis in Lund, held a seminar June 17, 2015. Günter and advisers at Sony Mobile and Lund University have developed the WozARd system and has received a couple of study visits from us earlier this academic year.

In this seminar, Günter did not only speak about Wizard of Oz for development of Augmented Reality. His experimenting has also included a Virtual Reality environment to simplify some Augmented Reality experiments. Naturally, this idea of testing augmented Reality in Virtual reality raises some methodological issues which Günter spent time to disentangle and gauge.

Günter furthermore revealed the news that the next day he was no longer working at Sony Mobile but would continue as a research student at Lund University, aiming for the doctor's degree.

The call for the seminar read:
The age of wearable technology devices is upon us. These devices are available in many different form factors including head-mounted displays (HMDs), smartwatches and wristbands. They enable access to information at a glance. They are intended to always be ‘‘on’’, to always be acting and to always be sensing the surrounding environment in order to offer a better interface to the real world. A technology suitable for these kinds of user interfaces (UIs) is augmented reality (AR) due to its ability to merge real and virtual objects.
It can be difficult and time consuming to prototype and evaluate this new design space due to components that are undeveloped or not sufficiently advanced. To overcome this dilemma and focus on the design and evaluation of new user interfaces instead, it is essential to be able to quickly simulate undeveloped components of a system to enable the collection of valuable feedback from potential users. The aim of this seminar is to present two methods that can be used for prototyping AR interaction.
After the seminar it was play time with Google's and Sony's AR glasses!

The seminar as seen through one pair of glasses