The book is about user interfaces to applications that have been designed for social and physical interaction. The interfaces are ‘playful’, that is, users feel challenged to engage in social and physical interaction because that will be fun. The topics that will be present in this book are interactive playgrounds, urban games using mobiles, sensor-equipped environments for playing, child-computer interaction, tangible game interfaces, interactive tabletop technology and applications, full-body interaction, exertion games, persuasion, engagement, evaluation and user experience. Readers of the book will not only get a survey of state-of-the-art research in these areas, but the chapters in this book will also provide a vision of the future where playful interfaces will be ubiquitous, that is, present and integrated in home, office, recreational, sports and urban environments, emphasizing that in the future in these environments game elements will be integrated and welcomed.

This book covers the latest advances in playful user interfaces – interfaces that invite social and physical interaction. These new developments include the use of audio, visual, tactile and physiological sensors to monitor, provide feedback and anticipate the behavior of human users. The decreasing cost of sensor and actuator technology makes it possible to integrate physical behavior information in human-computer interactions. This leads to many new entertainment and game applications that allow or require social and physical interaction in sensor- and actuator-equipped smart environments. The topics discussed include: human-nature interaction, human-animal interaction and the interaction with tangibles that are naturally integrated in our smart environments. Digitally supported remote audience participation in artistic or sport events is also discussed. One important theme that emerges throughout the book is the involvement of users in the digital-entertainment design process or even design and implementation of interactive entertainment by users themselves, including children doing so in educational settings.

Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses. They have much more in common than their perceived distinction typically suggests, and user experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design. This book will show you how.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence, EUSAI 2004, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands in November 2004. The 36 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ubiquitous computing: sofware architectures, communication, and distribution; context sensing and machine perception; human computer interaction in ambient intelligence environments; and algorithms, ontologies, and architectures for learning and adaptation.

What happens when you’ve built a great website or app, but no one seems to care? How do you get people to stick around long enough to see how your service might be of value? In Seductive Interaction Design, speaker and author Stephen P. Anderson takes a fresh approach to designing sites and interactions based on the stages of seduction. This beautifully designed book examines what motivates people to act. Topics include: AESTHETICS, BEAUTY, AND BEHAVIOR: Why do striking visuals grab our attention? And how do emotions affect judgment and behavior? PLAYFUL SEDUCTION: How do you create playful engagements during the moment? Why are serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other delights critical to a good experience? THE SUBTLE ART OF SEDUCTION: How do you put people at ease through clear and suggestive language? What are some subtle ways to influence behavior and get people to move from intent to action? THE GAME OF SEDUCTION: How do you continue motivating people long after the first encounter? Are there lessons to be gained from learning theories or game design? Principles from psychology are found throughout the book, along with dozens of examples showing how these techniques have been applied with great success. In addition, each section includes interviews with influential web and interaction designers.

Have you ever wondered why the play button for most music players is still the same right-facing triangle that was on every cassette player and VCR? User interface (UI) designers try to develop icons and controls that are so obvious they endure through the years and across technologies. For example, iPhone apps often feel so familiar because many designers use the UI toolkit from Apple with standard fonts and icons. Unlike user experience (UX) design, which has to do with the flow of a program, UI is all about the look and feel of software and hardware. With colorful photographs and helpful illustrations, readers will make the most of this essential coding topic.

In this publication, eighteen scholars examine the increasing role of digital media technologies in identity construction through play. This interdisciplinary collection argues that present-day play and games are not only appropriate metaphors for capturing postmodern human identities, but are in fact the means by which people create their identity.