KINAESTHESIA IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS
GAMIFICATION THROUGH GAME FEEL
Kinaesthesia is the awareness of the position and movement of the body in space. This concept has been extensively explored in UX for the ideation of nuance modes of interaction between body and interface, whereas another area of kinaesthetic design has been often neglected:
technologies enhance the perceptual capacities of the human body, creating not just kinaesthetic experience through the physical interaction between the user and the machine, but also a sense of embodiment inside the virtual interface itself.
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This work aims to extend the study on vicarious kinaesthesia, referred to as "game feel" in game design, not just to games but to all interfaces. In some extent, all interfaces express kinaesthetic perception through interaction, and that a more careful consideration of this aspects might enhance engagement and fluidity of usage.
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THE ARCHIVE
The prototype for a website that takes advantage of virtual kinaesthesia was created:
the "Archive", an online library that will contain novels and other books read as a free time activity and which aims to foster individual reading, teasing their curiosity through a sense of exploration and mystery.
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The Archive shows how to capitalize on kinaesthesia in classic software interfaces in two ways.
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EXPLORATION MODE
AN EXAMPLE OF GAMIFICATION WHICH USES KINESTHETIC GAME MECHANICS
Exploration mode is a platformer game. The user actively explores the rooms of the archive to find new books to read, mastering the platforming challenges along the way.
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He can encounter other players and chat with them or leave messages to suggest and to comment on books.
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For online archives, the activity of researching content is the one the users are involved the most. In our case, the research of content itself has been “gamified”. The website has been built as a physical library, divided in macro areas according to literary genres. The aim was to create a sense of exploration and mystery. Therefore, the approach that was followed has a high level of tangibility and world creation, to arouse curiosity on what would come next.
USER INTERFACE IN THE TUTORIAL
MAP OF THE ARCHIVE
SEARCH FUNCTION AND INCOMPLETE MAP OF A USER
The users can also leave messages on the level surface, to share opinion and comments on the book on the shelves. The length of the messages will need to be limited, as in the social platform “Twitter”, lest they cover all the surface of the page, and they will need to disappear after some time they have been written. The merit of this method of comment, nonetheless, is that the message displayed in the space provide a clear, immediately visible cue of the most appreciated books on the shelves.
LECTURE MODE
GIVE KINESTHETIC PROPERTIES TO THE INSTRUMENT OF INTERACTION
an eBook reader in which the user interacts with the text using a tool called “bookmarker”, which, unlike the mouse cursor, has been given kinetic properties such as a maximum speed, acceleration and deceleration, to sell the illusion of a physical object that moves on the pages of the text on a top-down perspective.
The user navigates the page using a “marker”. The marker is used to move the visualized text by “rolling” it through the page, and to highlight and select the text.
​The user can create multiple markers, to use them as bookmarks. When the user wants to remember the position of some quotation or interesting passage in the book, he creates a new marker and continues navigating the text with the new one, while the old one remains in that position. Pressing Tab, he can switch between markers to control each one of them.
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VIEW OF A PAGE ZOOMED OUT IN THE LECTURE MODE
NOTEPAD
The annotations, the highlighted texts and the marker positions are stored in the notepad, accessible also in exploration mode.