Visualizing positive and negative affordances in infancy using mobile augmented reality

This study proposed a prototype Augmented Reality (AR) application aimed at visualizing infants' affordances in their natural settings for prevention of accidents and promoting development. To visualize how infants perceive and acts toward everyday objects in their home environment, we (1) conducted longitudinal observations of 15 infants from 4 to 12 months of age at their homes in Japan and Portugal. (2) Developed AR application for iPhone and iPad with two types of vision-based markers. All AR contents are converted to line drawings for considering privacy based on the actual recording data. (3) Conducted informal user interviews and a user test to confirm validity and technical problems. The results demonstrated that the prototype could partially represent what the environment affords infants, and how infants interact with it using AR. The prototype will benefit from a possible future and widespread everyday use.