An Avatar-Based Approach to 3D User Interface Design for Children

Abstract

What works for adults will not necessarily work for children; however, most of the people designing and creating the user experience today still have not designed for children as a user group. Hopefully, this practical paper will appeal to those who aim children as end users in their 3D applications, but are unsure about how to proceed. The prototype used in the paper is a 3D content creation game, in which the children are enticed to do highly frequent professional 3D editing jobs with our redesigned 3D user interface, such as 3D terrain editing and texturing, 3D object creation and manipulation with aesthetic or functional goals, 3D scene composing with high spatial complexity, self-motivated story making in 3D worlds, and some kids-invented methods of 3D navigation and path-finding by modifying the environment and applying physical laws. This paper shows that how the frequent and perplexing manipulations of 3D user interface used by adult professionals could be redesigned and accomplished so successfully by children aged 7-12 without losing interests