Double Dribble: Mixed Reality Game Design for Sports Informatics Shaowen Bardzell1, Jeffrey Bardzell2, and William Ryan2 School of HPER, 1025 East 7th Street, Room 394, Bloomington, IN, 47408, USA School of Informatics, 1900 East 10th Street, Room 938, Bloomington, IN, 47406, USA {selu, jbardzel, wnryan} @indiana.edu Abstract Major professional sports have had limited success developing relationships with their non-local fan bases Virtual and mixed reality interfaces now make possible the design and implementation of virtual fan communities, which is one potential solution to the problem This poster presents a mixed reality basketball game, which emphasizes social interaction and fan community over physics and simulated basketball play The game is played in a virtual world, while data—audio, scores, statistics—from live NBA or collegiate basketball games is streamed in Keywords: Mixed reality, game design, sports, sports informatics, computermediated communication Introduction Sports, like most other cultural domains, are being transformed by new information communication technologies A growing body of research demonstrates how computer technology can be applied to sports, especially in the areas of performance and learning enhancement, leisure and entertainment, officiating, and equipment (Chi et al, 2005) Yet in the domain of major spectator sports—professional and upperdivision collegiate sports—franchises and teams struggle to reach their legions of devoted fans outside of their primary (local) markets, served by traditional media (Coyle, 2006) Specifically, fans want to feel they are contributing to their team (Coyle, 2006), that they are among like-minded fans, and that they can express the intensity of the emotional support for their teams (Kennedy, 2001; Weldon, 2006) The community outreach needs of major spectator sports teams would seem to benefit from an entertainment platform that combines the appeal of virtual communities— social networks, virtual collaboration/social activities, and personal expression—with the established marketing paradigms of old media, such as branding, advertising, data collection, and customer interaction Exploring this problem space led us to consider mixed reality environments (MREs), which boast a unique ability to synthesize both real and virtual world activities (Drascic and Milgram, 1996) and are poised to enrich user experience and enhance collaboration (Rogers et al, 2002) Prior work has been done in virtual/mixed reality and sporting events, including its application in instruction (Sepan and Žára, 2002), its combination with entertainment to motivate training (Hämäläinen et al, 2005), the examination of motor behavior of athletes when facing virtual opponents (Bideau et al, 2004), and the presentation of sporting events in mixed reality through free viewpoint video synthesis (Inamoto and Saito, 2004) While this research demonstrates how virtual and mixed reality can be used to provide instruction and entertainment for individuals, little is known how such environments, rich in their potential to support a sense of social presence of other actors (Becker and Mark, 2002), can be designed to enable sports fans to construct compelling virtual fan communities In collaboration with stakeholders in major league sports and video game development, our team is designing such a platform, Fanergy™ As one part of this platform, we have designed a mixed reality basketball game, code-named Double Dribble, which occurs simultaneously in the real and virtual worlds In Double Dribble, users play/observe an in-world basketball game whose outcome is affected by the live game Designing Double Dribble Double Dribble is a mixed reality basketball game in which participants “help their team” win by contributing to the score during the live event It combines a virtual world and streaming audio of a live NBA or NCAA game to create an experience that blends the basketball experience from both worlds 2.1 Environment Double Dribble uses different technologies to mix the realities of an in-world basketball game and a real-life broadcast game In contrast to most of the mixed reality experiences we’ve seen or read about, Double Dribble is primarily virtual; that is, reality augments a virtual interaction, rather than the other way around As noted, Double Dribble will feature an in-game audio control panel, which will enable users to listen to live (or prerecorded) game feeds A scoreboard will also display the current score and (an approximation of) the current game time In addition, when a basket is scored in the real game, an NBA or NCAA “ghost” (non-player) character will materialize in-game, steal the ball, and score a basket using one of a dozen or more animations, before returning the ball to the opposing team The space is a basketball venue, such as an arena or a street court with bleachers Players will wear special jerseys, which enable them to interact with the court (e.g., shooting the ball to the basket) As is standard among MMOGs, the game will feature a public chat interface as well as backchannel IM interfaces for communication Communication between and among fellow spectators and players in-world not only ensures player-user’ transference of real-world social conventions, but it also helps creating a sense of copresence in the virtual environment Figure shows a prototype of the game in action Fig Double Dribble augments virtual reality with real-life streamed data 2.2 Interaction Double Dribble is a light, socially-oriented simulation of a basketball game, accompanied by an audio feed of a streamed (live or prerecorded) audiocast of an NBA or NCAA game In contrast to commercial basketball video games, such as NBA Live and NBA Jam, Double Dribble does not attempt to simulate the depth of action and physics in a game, but rather provides an easy-to-play design that leaves players’ hands and minds free enough to engage socially and to follow the audio of the real-life game and encourages non-hardcore gamers to participate Modeled on simple interactions, such as the highly automated combat system of World of Warcraft, players choose from a number of automated behaviors, which control animated aggressiveness, likelihood of blocking a shot, stealing the ball, or committing a foul In addition to the players, other users will stand on the sidelines and chatter, commenting on the game and encouraging/trash-talking the participants This type of interaction is already common in virtual worlds, such as Second Life (Bardzell et al, forthcoming) 2.3 Ongoing Appeal A central concern in the design of Double Dribble was to give users reason to come back again and again We’ve designed several strategies to encourage repeat value, a couple of which we summarize here Player data is stored across multiple games in virtual jerseys, with RPG-like improvement over time built-in; players will score more baskets and block more shots the more they play In addition, because the jerseys are separate from the avatars, it makes game-play data transferable to other players, using the platform’s in-game economy and market system The opportunity to make money from playing Double Dribble will further give incentive to users to return for more play Future Directions Double Dribble is presently in the prototyping and evaluation stages To determine and improve its viability, we are pursuing parallel strategies First, we are conducting empirical experiments, in which groups of players come together and play versions of this game, which we record and analyze Second, we are prototyping some of the spaces and constructing machinima-based video prototypes, which we are sharing with our partner-stakeholders in professional and collegiate sports organizations References Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S., Ryan, W Virtual Events in Metaverse Worlds: The Intersection of Interfaces, Leisure, Commerce, and Persistent Groups (Forthcoming) Becker, B., Mark, G Social Conventions in Computer-Mediated Communication: A Comparison of Three Online Shared Virtual Environments In: Schroeder (ed.): The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments Springer-Verlag, London Berlin Heidelberg (2002) 19-39 Bideau, B., Multon, F., Kulpa, R., Fradet L., Arnaldi, B Virtual Reality Applied to Sports: Do Handball Goalkeepers React Realistically to Simulated Synthetic Opponents? Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Virtual Reality Continuum and Its Applications in Industry ACM Press, New York (2004) Chi, E., Borriello, G., Hunt, G., Davies, N.: Pervasive Computing in Sports Technologies IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol 4, No IEEE Computer Society, New York, New York (2005) 22-25 5 Coyle, P Colts.com: Reach More Avid Colts Fans, More Often Invited Talk at Indiana University (2006) Drascic, D., Milgram, P Perceptual Issues in Augmented Reality In Bolas, M T., Fisher S.S., and Merritt, J O (Eds.) 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