Age Invaders: Physical and Social Mixed Reality Games

Age Invaders is an intergenerational family entertainment system, which focuses on physical and social interactions using a mixed reality floor system.

The main design goals include: facilitating interactions between users with varied levels of skill in utilizing technology, utilizing the familiar physical motions from other activities to make an intuitive physical interface, and encouraging social interactions among families and friends.

Detailed implementation of the design process of our intergenerational entertainment system, Age Invaders, is covered in the article:

Eng Tat Khoo, Tim Merritt, and Adrian David Cheok. 2009.Designing physical and social intergenerational family entertainment. Interact. Comput. 21, 1-2 (January 2009), 76-87. DOI=10.1016/j.intcom.2008.10.009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2008.10.009

Older players and children competing with each other on the Age Invaders interactive floor system

Diagram of the Age Invaders game play with children and older relatives engaged in physical interaction on the interactive floor with parents joining in through the Internet

System diagram of Age Invaders including interactive LED tiled floor, bluetooth lanyard displays, bluetooth connected slippers, bluetooth handheld controllers, game server, and connection to online players

Age Invaders: Research Team at Mixed Reality Lab

From left: Mr Tim Merritt, research intern from Jyvaskyla University Finland; Mr Khoo Eng Tat, team leader; Mr Mervyn Lian, final-year ECE student; Mr Kelvin Yeo, final-year ECE student; and Mr Jerome Lee, research intern from Singapore Polytechnic.

http://www.eng.nus.edu.sg/research/Research_Gallery/research97.htm

Please explore the various publications related to the Age Invaders system:

Khoo, Eng T., Merritt, Tim, and Cheok, Adrian D. Designing a Mixed Reality Intergenerational Entertainment System, (book chapter) in The Engineering of Mixed Reality Systems, pages 121-141. Human-Computer Interaction Series. Springer, 1 edition, 2009. Google books version

Khoo, E.T., Merritt, T., Cheok, A.D., Designing Physical and Social Intergeneration Family Entertainment. Interacting with Computers. Special Issue: Enactive Interfaces, volume 21, issue 1-2, pages 76-87, January 2009.

Khoo, E.T., Merritt, T., Cheok, A.D., Lian, M., and Yeo, K., Age Invaders: User Studies of Intergenerational Computer Entertainment. Entertainment Computing ICEC 2007, 6th International Conference, Shanghai, China, September 15-17, 2007, Springer, Volume 4740, 231-242.

Age Invaders is a social physical game which allows grandparents to play harmoniously together with children in physical space, while parents can join in the game remotely through the internet. The parents can adjust the challenge for the older and younger players to balance the play. Joining from the virtual world, the parents can also introduce rewards/ power-ups and challenges.

This work was developed as part of the PhD thesis work of Eng Tat Khoo and members of the Mixed Reality Lab, Singapore. Tim Merritt joined the team in 2007 and conducted user research of players engaged in the game and articulation of the design process.

Age Invaders has been demonstrated at venues internationally in North America, Asia, and various academic journals including Interacting with Computers (IwC)

digital tools
physical computing
tangible
team-mates

Age Invaders: Physical and Social Mixed Reality Games

Art is art

Painting (or drawing)