![Dice (left) [49] and miniature figurine (right) [22] models, shared on Thingiverse.com via an open source license.](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Srinjita-Bhaduri/publication/317868807/figure/fig1/AS:508938584903680@1498351822496/Dice-left-49-and-miniature-figurine-right-22-models-shared-on-Thingiversecom_Q320.jpg)
![Proof-of-concept fabrication game designed by the research team. In this variant of Monopoly [32], players can choose to generate new dice during gameplay, thereby affecting the probability of good or bad outcomes.](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Srinjita-Bhaduri/publication/317868807/figure/fig2/AS:508938585743360@1498351822526/Proof-of-concept-fabrication-game-designed-by-the-research-team-In-this-variant-of_Q320.jpg)
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Fabrication Games: Using 3D Printers to Explore New Interactions for Tabletop Games
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Personal fabrication technologies such as 3D printers are becoming increasingly affordable, enabling many to own and use 3D printers in their own homes. Yet we have little understanding of how fabrication tools and technologies can be used and appropriated within the home. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and challenges related to using personal fabrication technologies as part of play, specifically in the context of board and tabletop games. We present an overview of existing uses of 3D printers in the context of gaming, which has largely focused on creating and replacing pieces for existing games. Drawing on existing uses of 3D printing in games, and on prior research in interacting with fabrication tools, we then introduce a set of gameplay elements that use the affordances of the 3D printer to enhance and extend gameplay. We evaluated these gameplay elements through a focus group with 9 gaming hobbyists, who provided feedback on these elements and designed new games that used these elements. Our contributions include an extended set of gameplay elements that leverage fabrication tools, a set of reference games, and guidelines for augmenting existing fabrication tools to support playful interactions.
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... Fabrication technologies such as 3D printers are becoming increasingly accessible to the general public chiefly because the equipment is becoming smaller, cheaper and easier to operate. As a result, people have begun to explore incorporation of 3D printers into game design, coining terms like fabrication games or playful fabrication [6,31]. However, current fabrication games typically focus on utilizing 3D printers to generate pieces in advance for use in analog games, e.g., [6], rather than leveraging the real-time fabrication capabilities of such tools directly into the gameplay. ...
... As a result, people have begun to explore incorporation of 3D printers into game design, coining terms like fabrication games or playful fabrication [6,31]. However, current fabrication games typically focus on utilizing 3D printers to generate pieces in advance for use in analog games, e.g., [6], rather than leveraging the real-time fabrication capabilities of such tools directly into the gameplay. ...
... Integrating fabrication technology, namely 3D printers, into video games provides a novel opportunity for creating tangibles that can support embodied game design and learning [6]. While there are various techniques to incorporate embodiment into games, such as through AR or VR, the use of tangibles and tangible interactions for embodied game design is one of the most popular approaches [19]. ...
3D printers are becoming increasingly accessible to the average consumer, however their potential utility within games has yet to be fully explored. Integrating 3D printer fabrication technology within game design presents a novel means for engaging players and providing them with tangible representations of gameplay elements. This in turn could be employed to increase embodied gameplay and even embodied learning for the player. In this paper, we present a novel "fabrication game" designed to teach basic evolutionary concepts. In the game, players take turns physically assembling components 3D printed in real-time to iteratively evolve their creatures and observe the impact of their evolutionary choices on a digital population simulation. We discuss the potential of this game's unique design in leveraging real-time fabrication of tangibles to enhance a player's understanding of principles of evolution and natural selection.
... Modeling Technologies for Children 3D printing is increasingly present in daily live especially in fields like engineering, science, architecture, healthcare, the food industry, and the fashion industry [5,7,44]. The creative and educational potential of 3D printing and 3D modeling makes it an excellent platform for children to design and print their 3D artifacts in schools, makerspaces, and libraries [10,42,57] and further develop their creativity, spatial thinking, and problem-solving skills. ...
... Smart tangible toys (Mironcika et al., 2018), for instance, could be used for gamifying serious tasks or supporting change in behavior. Likewise, personal fabrication technologies such as 3D printers could be appropriated within a game frame (Bhaduri et al., 2017) to create novel gamified activities (Rapp et al., 2017). Further, wearable technologies are starting being used in game research, for example to increase the immersiveness and player/character relationship (Buruk & Özcan, 2018), and could be inspiring for gamification ends as well. ...
Gamification is now a well-established technique in Human-Computer Interaction. However, research on gamification still faces a variety of empirical and theoretical challenges. Firstly, studies of gamified systems typically focus narrowly on understanding individuals. short-term interactions with the system, ignoring more difficult to measure outcomes. Secondly, academic research on gamification has been slow to improve the techniques through which gamified applications are designed. Third, current gamification research lacks a critical lens capable of exploring unintended consequences of designs. The 14 articles published in this special issue face these challenges with great methodological rigor. We summarize them by identifying three main themes: the determination to improve the quality and usefulness of theory in the field of gamification, the improvements in design practice, and the adoption of a critical gaze to uncover side-effects of gamification designs. We conclude by providing an overview of the questions that we feel must be addressed by future work in gamification. Gamification studies would benefit from a wider use of theories to account for the complexity of human behavior, a more thorough exploration of the many opportunities coming from the world of games, and an ethical reflection on the use of game design elements in serious domains.
This paper questions design priorities in computational systems and proposes that social aspects of material practice are overlooked in existing computational design practices. An interactive fabrication system designed for this project: Digital Tufting Bee centres on machine tufting, an adaptation of the handcrafting technique for making voluminous folds of yarn. The word ‘Bee’ refers to a quilting tradition in which a group comes together to quilt; I use this term to emphasize communal effort, shared decision-making and collective meaning-making in computational design processes. Building on literature in Science and Technology Studies, I argue that collective material practice and social play deepen human engagement in making processes and further challenge existing orders of computational design processes. By collecting and analysing qualitative data from three tufting workshops, I observed that uncertainties of yarn, conversation during making, tendencies to leave space for others, and exchange of crafting skills brought valuable meaning to interactive tufting. This paper concludes that as long as researchers involve communal aspects of making to connect makers, tools, materials and their communities, computational making could challenge the dominant design paradigm. Based on these findings, promising areas of further study include rituals of gift giving and collective textile repair in material practices.
Gaming accessibility research for blind or low vision (BLV) commu- nities largely focuses on digital games. There is a need for designers to understand BLV’s experience with tabletop games that involve the player’s physical interaction. In this study, we investigate BLV individuals’ experience with the accessibility of tabletop games. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 BLV participants and found four themes that uncovered participants’ tabletop gam- ing experiences: (1) properties of inaccessible games, (2) outcomes of inaccessible games, (3) properties of accessible games, and (4) outcomes of accessible games. Our findings demonstrate a richness and variety in BLV individuals’ tabletop gaming experiences. By providing discussions on the state of tabletop game interactivity and design recommendations, our work assists the creation of ac- cessible tangible games that make use of digital information and physical forms by affording designers the opportunity to under- stand how inaccessible interactions in tabletop games affect BLV populations.
We explore the future of fabrication, in particular the vision of mobile fabrication, which we define as " personal fabrication on the go ". We explore this vision with two surveys, two simple hardware prototypes, matching custom apps that provide users with access to a solution database, custom fabrication processes we designed specifically for these devices, and a user study conducted in situ on metro trains. Our findings suggest that mobile fabrication is a compelling next direction for personal fabrication. From our experience with the prototypes we derive the hardware requirements to make mobile fabrication technically feasible .
Current interactive fabrication tools offer tangible feedback by allowing users to work directly on the physical model, but they are slow because users need to participate in the physical instantiation of their designs. In contrast, CAD software offers powerful tools for 3D modeling but delays access to the physical workpiece until the end of the design process. In this paper we propose On-the-Fly Print: a 3D modeling approach that allows the user to design 3D models digitally while having a low-fidelity physical wireframe model printed in parallel. Our software starts printing features as soon as they are created and updates the physical model as needed. Users can quickly check the design in a real usage context by removing the partial physical print from the printer and replacing it afterwards to continue printing. Digital content modification can be updated with quick physical correction using a retractable cutting blade. We present the detailed description of On-the-Fly Print and showcase several examples designed and printed with our system.
For visually impaired users, making sense of spatial information is difficult as they have to scan and memorize content before being able to analyze it. Even worse, any update to the displayed content invalidates their spatial memory, which can force them to manually rescan the entire display. Making display contents persist, we argue, is thus the highest priority in designing a sensemaking system for the visually impaired. We present a tactile display system designed with this goal in mind. The foundation of our system is a large tactile display (140x100cm, 23x larger than Hyperbraille), which we achieve by using a 3D printer to print raised lines of filament. The system's software then trades in this space in order to minimize screen updates. Instead of panning and zooming, for example, our system creates additional views, leaving display contents intact and thus supporting users in preserving their spatial memory. We illustrate our system and its design principles at the example of four spatial applications. We evaluated our system with six blind users. Participants responded favorably to the system and expressed, for example, that having multiple views at the same time was helpful. They also judged the increased expressiveness of lines over the more traditional dots as useful for encoding information.
In this work, we explore the concept of using projected content on top of board game sessions in order to improve the overall accessibility of a board game session. In our work we use technology to add a secondary information layer that provides board game content on top of the physical board game that is being played. We present an initial study examining the types of problems that exist in board game sessions and provide guidance on how projection mapped systems can be used in order to increase accessibility in this area.
Several recent projects have introduced digital machines to the kitchen, yet their impact on culinary culture is limited. We envision a culture of Digital Gastronomy that enhances traditional cooking with new interactive capabilities, rather than replacing the chef with an autonomous machine. Thus, we deploy existing digital fabrication instruments in traditional kitchen and integrate them into cooking via hybrid recipes. This concept merges manual and digital procedures, and imports parametric design tools into cooking, allowing the chef to personalize the tastes, flavors, structures and aesthetics of dishes. In this paper we present our hybrid kitchen and the new cooking methodology, illustrated by detailed recipes with degrees of freedom that can be set digitally prior to cooking. Lastly, we discuss future work and conclude with thoughts on the future of hybrid gastronomy.
We present Invasion of the Energy Monsters, a board game that attempts to highlight the role of family practices in household energy consumption. While household energy management activities -- such as controlling heating and cooling systems -- tend to be adult centric, we believe that children and adolescents have a meaningful role to play in helping their families move toward more sustainable ways of living. To that end, Energy Monsters has been designed to scaffold interactions between family members and encourage conversations about electricity consumption and waste. In this paper we provide an overview of our current design and a brief summary of results from our playtesting sessions with five families, and a description of versions that are under development.
Interest in understanding and facilitating 3D digital fabrication is growing in the HCI research community. However, most of our insights about end-user interaction with fabrication are currently based on interactions of professional users, makers, and technology enthusiasts. We present a study of casual makers, users who have no prior experience with fabrication and mainly explore walk-up-and-use 3D printing services at public print centers, such as libraries, universities, and schools. We carried out 32 interviews with casual makers, print center operators, and fabrication experts to understand the motivations, workflows, and barriers in appropriating 3D printing technologies. Our results suggest that casual makers are deeply dependent on print center operators throughout the process from bootstrapping their 3D printing workflow, to seeking help and troubleshooting, to verifying their outputs. However, print center operators are usually not trained domain experts in fabrication and cannot always address the nuanced needs of casual makers. We discuss implications for optimizing 3D design tools and interactions that can better facilitate casual makers' workflows.
This paper presents findings from a study of boardgamers which stress the importance of the materiality of modern boardgames. It demonstrates that materiality is one of four significant factors in the player experience of tabletop gaming and describes four domains of materiality in boardgaming settings. Further, building on understanding of non-use in HCI, it presents boardgames as a unique situation of parallel use, in which users simultaneously engage with a single game in both digital and material, non-digital environments.
While personal fabrication tools, such as laser cutters and milling machines, are intended for construction, we are exploring their use for destruction. We present a series of games that result in valuable physical objects being destroyed objects owned by the players. Interestingly, we found that we can design these games to be desirable to play, despite the loss of the object, by instead producing social value. As part of a user study, twelve students played a destructive game in which a laser cutter cut up their own money bills. Surprisingly, 8 out of 12 participants would play again. They shared their post-game stories with us.