Half-Court Show

Half-Court Show is an exertion game that explores how digital displays can affect the experience of players, spectators, and passers-by in urban public game spaces. Prior games for public spaces have examined how digital games can enhance existing public venues, but no other work has yet examined how technology can impact public spaces where games are already being played. Our research with Half-Court Show was aimed at answering questions about how score, numbers, and digital technology can influence existing casual sports activity. It has led us to develop a set of design guidelines to help future designers of such systems. We find that designers must consider how noticeable the display is to different groups, how the display supports different user actions, and how such displays can connect different users together. Our results lead us to a number of concrete design recommendations, such as using context to drive feelings of fantasy that our display elicited in players. The significance of this work is attested by its acceptance into the proceedings of the UBICOMP 2013 conference, a leading conference in the Human-Computer Interaction discipline (previously ranked ERA A), focused on ubiquitous and pervasive computing. The work will also be shown at the videoshowcase venue at the same event in Zurich, Switzerland.