Project IRL: Playful Co-Located Interactions with Mobile Augmented Reality

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DOI

We present Project IRL, a suite of five mobile apps we created to explore novel ways of supporting in-person social interactions with Augmented Reality. In recent years, public discourse has blamed digital technologies for making people feel "alone together,'' distracting them away from one another when interacting in-person. Motivated this challenge, we focused on an under-explored design space: playful co-located interactions. We evaluated the apps through a deployment study that involved interviews and participant observations with 101 people. We synthesized the results into a design guidelines focused on four themes: (1) device arrangement, e.g., are people sharing one phone, or does each have their own? (2) enablers, e.g., should the activity focus on an object, body part, or pet?, (3) affordances of modifying reality, and (4) types of play. We close by providing design guidelines for future work on embodied social AR.