Methods Developed
1. Immersive Video Sketching is an accessible and cost-effective method that allows people from various backgrounds to sketch and experience their ideas in extended reality environments. With this method, designers can quickly transfer their ideas to 360-degree immersive environments where they can preview immersive user scenarios through cardboard VR goggles and mobile phones.
2. Fusion Workshops: Fusion workshops represents a fragmented participatory design workshop structure where stakeholders are sensitized to different parts of a phenomenon in separate workshops. Later, these participants are gathered together in a bigger workshop in mixed groups to share their knowledge and ideate on new design concepts together by combining different facets of a topic.
Design Knowledge Generated
WEARTUAL project generated design knowledge in many different levels in the forms of design frameworks, design themes, and speculative/fictional design concepts. We can summarize the generated design knowledge as follows:
1. Design Framework for Playful Wearables
This framework introduces a broad framework regarding how to use playfulness while designing wearables. According to the framework, playful wearable design can be examined under three main planes, performative, social, and interactive. These planes are spectrums: Performative plane defines playful wearables between a spectrum of imaginary and immersive, Social Plane; between tight and relaxed and Interactive Plane is between artifact-oriented and embodied.
2. Design Implications
We have generated design implications through our workshops that can help with the integration of wearables into mainstream entertainment systems such as consoles, computers or virtual reality systems. Our implications suggest that 1) Wearables can lead body movements in a way that can help players to built affective relationships with their avatars, 2) wearables might extend the bodies of players through virtual worlds and create hybrid bodily perception, 3) they might allow adorning the body with pieces which help identification with avatars, 4) can lead to collocated physical interaction, 5) might increase the engagement and belongingness of players to particular games, 6) can extend the gameplay from screens to the daily life and 7) can be a bridge among the environment, players' body and the virtual worlds.
3. Design Themes
During our studies, by analyzing the input of our participants' we created an ample amount of design themes that can be useful in playful wearables design for playful and extended reality environments. Regarding the extended reality environments, we demonstrated that the wearables can be virtual costumes, modify the bodily perception and incorporate social interactions through bio-adaptivity in extended reality environments.
All these results, apart from advancing the overall design research and design methods for extended reality environments also introduced novel and state of the art knowledge for the design of playful wearables which will help designers of wearables and other bodily technologies.
