Massive flux design for an interactive water installation: WATER GAMES * Narc´ ıs Par´ es, Jaume Durany, Anna Carreras Experimentation on Interactive Communication IUA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra Pg. Circumvalaci ´ o, 8 08003 Barcelona, Spain npares, jdurany, acarreras @iua.upf.es ABSTRACT This paper identifies and contextualizes the limitations and problems found in interactive installations that require a massive flux of users. It then presents a set of solutions for these practical problems and shows how they have been applied to a real life installation with exceptionally good results. The application is an interactive water installation for children and their families for the international event called “Universal Forum of Cultures, Barcelona 2004”. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces—Ergonomics, Evaluation/methodology, Interac- tion styles General Terms Performance, Design, Reliability, Experimentation, Human Factors Keywords Interactive attractions, interaction-driven design, real time interaction, throughput 1. INTRODUCTION The promise of interactive technologies becoming an impor- tant element in large scale edutainment and leisure installa- tions has been flying in the air for the last ten to fifteen years * Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, re- quires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Conference04, Month 12, 2004, City, State, Country. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0004...$5.00. without really becoming a reality. Only small and medium location based entertainment (LBE) has managed to work reasonably well, through video game type applications in coin op formats and with relatively standard interfaces. But when we turn to medium and large capacity attractions (in amusement or water parks), interaction presents a series of important limitations that have made it become more of a headache than an advantage for managers and designers alike. We will now analyze briefly the current state of the art in in- teractive installations and attractions to see their handicaps and advantages. With this we will then be able to define a list of general issues that must always be dealt with. Finally we will then describe the design process of an interactive wa- ter installation and how it has tackled possible solutions to the previously defined problems. 2. INTERACTIVE INSTALLATIONS There are some partly successful examples of interactive in- stallations in medium and large scale LBE. Most of large scale interactive attractions such ”Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin” [3] and ”Men in Black” [6] have obtained a huge level of visitors per hour by using large capacity trans- port systems within the attraction (see table 1), mainly de- signed by Disney in the 60’s [5]. However, their interaction is poor and can be considered as merely shoot up galleries or arcades in motion. Their robustness is compromised by the necessity of providing the users with special guns with which to shoot appearing enemies. Although in both attractions the experience of a few (2 or 6) users occurs simultaneously in time and space, it is basically an individual experience. In the case of medium sized interactive attractions we can basically count those in DisneyQuest [7], like ”Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride” and ”Pirates of the Caribbean: Bat- tle for Buccaneer Gold”. The idea of a transport system is not used in this experiences; in the first one a head-mounted display (HMD) is used, while in the second users must wear active 3D glasses. These changes introduce a long prepa- ration phase of the user and a long learning curve of the navigation interface and of the navigation itself within the experience. Some robustness issues also appear because of the physical interfaces and devices. Although the cabins are multiplied as many times as the available space allows for, both present an extremely low throughput (see Table 1). In