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Pac-Euglena: A Living Cellular Pac-Man Meets Virtual Ghosts

Published: 23 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The advancement of biotechnology enabled the development of "biotic video games", where human players manipulate real biological samples for fun and educational human-biology interactions. However, new design principles are needed to both leverage and mitigate biological properties (e.g., variability and stochasticity), and create unique play experiences that transcend traditional video games. This paper describes the implementation of Pac-Euglena, a biotic Pac-Man analog, where players guide live microscopic Euglena cells with light stimuli through a physical microfluidic maze. Through use of multi-modal stimuli, a mixed biology-digital-human reality is achieved, enabling cell interactions with virtual ghosts and collectibles. Through an iterative design process, we illustrate challenges and strategies for designing games with living organisms. A user study (n=18, conducted at a university event) showed that Pac-Euglena was fun, stimulated curiosity, and taught users about Euglena. We conclude with five general guidelines for the design and development of biotic games and HBI interfaces.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2020
10688 pages
ISBN:9781450367080
DOI:10.1145/3313831
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Published: 23 April 2020

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Author Tags

  1. augmented reality
  2. biological user interfaces
  3. biotic games
  4. euglena gracilis
  5. human-biology interaction (hbi)
  6. mixed reality

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  • Korean Government

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  • (2023)Cyano-chromic Interface: Aligning Human-Microbe Temporalities Towards Noticing and Attending to Living ArtefactsProceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3563657.3596132(820-838)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
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