Friday, December 26, 2014

The Interview and the first cyber war.

BBC News - Sony comedy The Interview opens



You do wonder if this is the result of North Korea responding to the online distribution of 'the interview' on Google + Xbox + Sony networks. Perhaps it's just the networks not able to account for the number of new users with new machines at Christmas ( more likely). 



I do feel people will look back on the last few weeks and some future historians will mark this off and declare it the beginning of the first cyber war (possibly first cyber skirmish who knows).


Friday, December 19, 2014

Book deal signed.

I am very pleased to announce that I and my fellow editors have today signed a deal with Springer for an edited book on Architecture and Interaction. 

http://www.springer.com/gb/


I find it hard to get the right words to tell you how excited I am about this

Monday, December 15, 2014

CHI2015 here we come

I got some very pleasing news today that the paper Paul and I wrote. 
Display blindness? Looking again at the visibility of situated displays using eye-tracking (paper number 236)

 athas been accepted as a full paper at CHI. 

Wohoo

Good news doesn't get better than this.



Wednesday, December 3, 2014

JIBO: The World's First Family Robot

It's looking like 2015 will be the year of the voice driven interface. First echo and now this. Although JIBO looks like it has more character through its use of motion ( thank you Pixar  and Luxor lamp) .



To be honest I'd like one of these so I can be a participant in meetings at work. Am still not a big fan of voice driven interfaces. let's see.





Fun looking Phone interaction design app





Mitya - The fastest way to prototype interactions



Another intreasting app  this time specialising in transitions and movement.




Fun looking Phone interaction design app





Mitya - The fastest way to prototype interactions



Another intreasting app  this time specialising in transitions and movement.




Friday, November 28, 2014

Smart Watches, Wearables, and That Nasty Data Rash - Part 2

Smart Watches, Wearables, and That Nasty Data Rash - Part 2



"A subset of marketers persistently and excitedly promise a future of location-based advertising where we’re pummeled by ad messages and discount offers as we pass by storefronts or walk through shop aisles"



Strange our contrast between the physical and off-line worlds. In the physical world this sounds nightmarish, but isn't this what happens in the digital world already? Content based on my emails and once you've have looked at previously always seems to follow me around the Internet. 



I guess it's a matter of how we display the adverts. I've been followed for months for ads about smart tags, which would be okay. Given that the biggest segment of marketing on the Internet seems to do with Viagra, then being followed around by adverts for penis enlargement and begging letters from African princess seems to be another. So seeing the advert is one thing having adverts about us that others can see is another.



The article also references a very cool device Nymi.  http://www.getnymi.com  vision of which I think is perfect, unfortunately it's the sort of thing you could do easily with an Apple Watch in software. That said, this machine is independent (it can operate without being a peripheral for a mobile phone ). From a convenience point of view, this kind of identifier works really well, unfortunately it also has the slight problem that you tend to invest the device with your identity and all the chilling aspects that in tales. 


Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Rebutting science fiction.

That's the CHI rebuttle off.
plus got some experiments done ( 4 people - nice results so far )

nice thing about technology on BBC ...
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140110-technologys-greatest-myth


Mentions

Lecturing in late 1968, the American sociologist Harvey Sacks addressed one of the central failures of technocratic dreams. We have always hoped, Sacks argued, that “if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Instead, though, even our best and brightest devices must be accommodated within existing practices and assumptions in a “world that has whatever organisation it already has.”


http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781444328301

Why do we have technocratic dreams ? Why not polticratic dreams or sococratic dreams.

I wonder why we have science-fiction, but not the Law-fiction (fiction based on speculation on what the world would be like in the future with diffrent systems of laws ) Social-fiction ( people who speculate on what the world would be like in the future with different systems of social organization ).  Art-fiction ( people who speculate on what the world would be like in the future with diffrent types of art ) or Author-fiction ( people who speculate on what the world would be like in the future with diffrent systems types of litrature ). So why science fiction ?

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

WatchKit - Apple Developer

WatchKit - Apple Developer



The Watchgate is now available. About every 10 years a new type of user interface becomes publicly available,  I was finest moments incredibly exciting as new paradigms of interaction become possible. Over the next few months some lucky people are about to begin to make their fortunes.  New household names are about to be born how exciting.

Friday, November 7, 2014

The book proposal is in.

I've sent off the book proprosal ( finally ) Yeah!  

Feeling like I'm getting stuff done ( finally)

Vessyl - Automatically Track Everything You Drink

Is this for real ? I'm not sure. It claims it to beable to sense a huge amount, the display looks like a special effect in a movie ( i.e. really cool ).



Assuming it does exist it would be a really cool example of ubicomp interaction.





Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Space in Videos - 2014 - 10 - Ambition the film

I could say that I liked the gesture-based user interfaces. In fact I'm including it only on the basis that I just like the video.

Space in Videos - 2014 - 10 - Ambition the film:

 

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

BBC News - Silicon Valley's billion dollar start-up failures

BBC News - Silicon Valley's billion dollar start-up failures: Hammering that home, a recent CB Insights survey found some 42% of failed start-ups blamed their demise on a basic lack of a market need for their product.



which is why we have HCI.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Mapping the Landscape of Sustainable HCI

This is an interesting paper which shows how clustered around particular topics sustainable HCI is.



The calls for further connection with outside fields is significant. If I had time I would like to review the papers listed in this paper. I have always been surprised about  the number of behaviour change papers labelled as sustainable HCI.



From my point of view what makes sustainable  HCI different from traditional HCI is we are trying to control technology. That is deliberately promote technology which already has a cheaper alternative (oil,gas) in many ways you can think of this as fair trade technology. Normally you want you technology to recede into the background, much as the case for pervasive interaction. Fair trade technology wants to reverse this process it wants you to become more aware of a particular technology and therefore choose it over another despite being less objectively competative. In which case of fair trade goods, we are willing to pay more in order to support social goals. Green technology is a fair trade technology. We want you to choose this technology over other technologies on the basis of some quality ( in this case environmental impact).








Senarios

While doing other research I came across these European standardised future scenarios for ambient intelligence.



Is this just me or do they feel a little spooky and weirdly dystopian ?

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

The quote that defines HCI.

From An Architecture for the Integration of Physical and Informational Spaces: a quote which sums up HCI research in one sentence.



"While computer processing power, storage capacity, and bandwidth are continuing to experience exponential growth, individual human processing capabilities are not increasing significantly."

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Google I/O 2014 - Polymer and Web Components change everything you know ...



A very cool bit of software - it Basically takes the mess of HTML JavaScript and CSS and turns it into a series of consistent 'things' or objects.  Naturally everything they've done is everything that software engineering did when they invented sensible programming languages. With this we've moved from basic and goto to Pascal.   - it might even make programming the web fun again. 



look out for  'fun'damental 



Notes 

http://bower.io



http://jqueryui.com


Saturday, October 4, 2014

"Unable to determine SimDeviceSet, set_path=" - Google Search

Why do I get



 "Unable to determine SimDeviceSet, set_path="

Whan I try to make a new simulator to test something with

and
"SourceCache/DVTiOSFrameworks/DVTiOSFrameworks-6268/DTDeviceKitBase/DTDeviceKitBase_Utilities.m:1146’"

when I create a new project ?
with the new Xcode. ?

Friday, September 26, 2014

Jakob Nielson - Google should be bothered to save 1 million lives

Like the title ?

I liked the bit that says that Android changes could save 1 million lives over the next 10 years by doing something about driver distractio.

Jakob Nielsen, "Mobile Usability Futures" | Talks at Google





Very little about Mobility but a good talk otherwise.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Talks University of Glasgow :: School of Computing Science :: Events :: Event Item

Here is a link to a talk I will be doing in Glasgow soon.



University of Glasgow :: School of Computing Science :: Events :: Event Item

Our isolated lives

The nightmare which is known as CHI now over. I've been recovering and thinking about what to do next. Naturally it's easy to start looking at all the negatives of technology and wondering what can be done about them.

One of the things that struck me was how isolating modern technology makes us. We no longer stand at the bus stop and potentially strike up a conversation with the familiar co-traveler. I regularly sit on the train and just stare at the laptop Along with most of my fellow passengers. It seems that modern technology that seems to that promised how much we would be connected seems to be disconnecting us from each other.

Cultural analyst Sherry Turtle is very good TED talk about this.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together?language=en

Then is see this ...


and I think ho - hum. 

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Chi paper

Another intensive weekend working on the paper played very enjoyable by having Paul come up to visit and work.

Monday, September 15, 2014

Alan Kay at OOPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasnt happened yet



Cool talk - IT could so wonderfully offend some of my more numerate compuationalist colleges at open Universirty.

Love the bit about Euler and the tape as self format.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

A moments pause to reflect on the meaning of HCI.

I was talking to a college at the OU who is best described as that irritating bit of sand which a clam swallows to generate a Perl.
We got on to the problem of what makes HCI different from general design. I said that it was partly the level of degree between the kinds of complexity a physical product can have against the complexity a digital product affords.
Being from a philosophical background (I think) he said he would not accept anything without a clear categorical difference. I then said, that most physical products are based on physics, we can intuitively predict them using our knowledge of the real world. Where computing gets different is that the affordances are from logic, mathematics and sometimes probability – things people are generally bad at. We agreed you could skip over all products where the computer was just the more complex way of doing a physical or electrical thing. If you press a button and the light goes on even if a computer is doing all the work it’s not ‘computing’ in the sense we agreed to mean it.
While I still think that complexity is an issue, the kinds of mental models we can build up for truly digital products is different (bigger) for other products. The notion of physical, mental models vs logic, mental models is curious.
If I wasn’t busy with chi deadline, I might do some research. The one thing which worries me is, if I start doing tangible interaction have I left HCI research?

( must work on CHI papers , must work on CHI paper ) 

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Experience Mapping

Interesting article on a interaction technique ( more representaion) I didn't know about. 
Now I must get back to paper writing.


Thursday, August 14, 2014

Open Plan Is Dead. Long Live The New World Of Work





Interesting if slightly long piece about technology and space From some of the most advanced engineers on the planet.

( must get back to writing CHI paper)

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction

ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction



"The ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI) will be the second international symposium focused on the user interface challenges that appear when users interact in the space where the flat, two-dimensional, digital world meets the volumetric, physical, three-dimensional (3D) space we live in. This considers both spatial input and output, with an emphasis on the issues around interaction between humans and systems. It provides a unique opportunity for industrial and academic researchers to exchange about the state-of-the-art spatial and 3D interaction research! Last year, ACM SUI 2013 was successfully held in Los Angeles, co-located with ACM SIGGRAPH." 

this looks like of cool - must think about this for next year. 



Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Watch_Dogs WeAreData

Watch_Dogs WeAreData It's not often I describe a user interface as awesome but I will use it in this case. This urban visualisation ( of public data) is nothing short of awesome. The image below does not do it justice you have to experience it to believe it.




Friday, July 4, 2014

Rose Johnson gets a PHD!

Dear all,

I am really pleased to let you know that Rose Johnson successfully defended her thesis last week. The title of her thesis is: In Touch with the Wild: Exploring Real-time Feedback for Learning to Play the Violin. Her examiners were Prof Stephen Brewster (Glasgow Univ) and Anthony Steed (UCL).

Her supervisors were Yvonne Rogers, Nadia Berthouze and Janet van der Linden. 


Rose is one of  the shareit Phd Students! 

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Teensy 3.1 - Cool Components

Teensy 3.1 - Cool Components



Teensy 3.1 - very small fast Arduino like board - touch enabled pins are intreasting. Ablity to have clock good.


must get back to work... 

Monday, June 30, 2014

1000 profile views!

Sheep Dalton | The Open University - Academia.edu



I have just passed the 1000 profile view marks on academia.edu - you've got to celebrate these vanity metrics.



share and enjoy.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Oracle human error course of 45% of down time.

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/2012-ioug-db-survey-1695554.pdf ( 2012)


42% of errors from human administrator errors.
  1. J. Gray. Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It? Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems, 3–12, 1986.

 http://roc.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ROC_TR02-1175.pdf
"A major observation from the field of human error research, labeled the Automation Irony, is that automation does not cure human error. The reasoning is that once designers realize that humans make errors, they often try to design a system that reduces human intervention. Automation usually addresses the easy tasks for humans, leaving to the operator the complex, rare tasks that were not successfully automated. Humans, who are not good at solving problems from first principles, are ill suited to such tasks, especially under stress. The irony is that automation reduces the chance for operators to get hands-on control experience, preventing them from building mental production rules and models for troubleshooting. Thus, automation often decreases system visibility, increases system complexity, and limits opportunities for interaction, all of which can make it harder for operators to use and make it more likely for them to make mistakes.
Our lessons from human error research are that human operators will always be involved with systems and that humans will make errors, even when they truly know what to do. The challenge is to design systems that are synergistic with human operators, ideally giving operators a chance to familiarize themselves with systems in a safe environment, and to correct their own errors. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_error

One of the most famous incidents of an aircraft disaster attributed to pilot error was the night time crash ofEastern Air Lines Flight 401 near Miami, Florida on December 29, 1972. The captain, first officer, and flight engineer had become fixated on a faulty landing gear light and had failed to realize that the flight controls had been bumped by one of the crew altering the autopilot settings from level flight to a slow descent. Told by ATC to hold over a sparsely populated area away from the airport while they dealt with the problem (with, as a result, very few lights on the ground visible to act as an external reference), the distracted flight crew did not notice the plane losing height and the aircraft eventually struck the ground in the Everglades, killing 101 out of 176 passengers and crew.


During 2004 in the United States, pilot error was listed as the primary cause of 78.6% of fatal general aviation accidents, and as the primary cause of 75.5% of general aviation accidents overall.[4] Forscheduled air transport, pilot error typically accounts for just over half of worldwide accidents with a known cause.[5]

  • 12 October 1997 – Singer John Denver died when his newly-bought Rutan Long-EZ home-built aircraft crashed into the Pacific Ocean off Pacific Grove, California. The NTSB indicated that Denver lost control of the aircraft while attempting to manipulate the fuel selector handle, which had been placed in a hard-to-reach position by the aircraft's builder. The NTSB cited his unfamiliarity with the aircraft's design as a cause of the crash.
  • 4 August 2005 – the pilots of Helios Airways Flight 522 lost consciousness, most likely due to hypoxiacaused by failure to switch the cabin pressurization to "Auto" during the pre-flight preparations. TheBoeing 737-300 crashed after running out of fuel, killing all on board.


Thursday, June 19, 2014

Visualizations Make Big Data Meaningful | June 2014 | Communications of the ACM

Visualizations Make Big Data Meaningful | June 2014 | Communications of the ACM



An interesting article on the ACM about the fusion of art and big data visualisation.



links to  Googles DevArt ( a competition I think ).



https://devart.withgoogle.com/en#/about/


Friday, June 13, 2014

Milton Keynes trials city-wide public 'internet of things' network | Technology | The Guardian

Milton Keynes trials city-wide public 'internet of things' network | Technology | The Guardian


This  appears to be mostly about digital monitoring of parking spaces and rubbish bins which sounds too be a quite viable idea.  The Internet of things is dawning ( at least in Milton Keyens).

Digital carpets go main stream BBC News - Digital carpets

BBC News - Digital carpets: Can you spill water on them?: Desso has teamed up with Philips



Actually this is just a translucent carpet on a normal LED Matrix.  If you look at the video you can see that the carpet is actually quite a thick platform.



see http://oro.open.ac.uk/38707/1/ITS140-Dalton%20(Preprint).pdf 


Monday, May 19, 2014

Bangkok’s skyride and skypark | World Infrastructure News

Bangkok’s skyride and skypark | World Infrastructure News

I do find the notion of cantilevering out from the existing elevated train track to be incredibly interesting. I don't know much about the weather in Bangkok, but I would imagine that it gets pretty hot. If it is anything like the weather in Atlanta you could find that people can cycle quite comfortably in the morning and evening which is the normal commute point.

Otherwise, I would have expected such a line to have some shade from the sun and protection from the rain. Not for enclosure perhaps just some sheltering like a bus stop.



Generally this is quite an interesting proposal.

Display versus utility

My wife came across the interface for this coffee machine."The instructions display is the small rectangular screen to the top right, which begs the question, why the large screen to the left?"


Clearly the larger screen is meant as an advertising facility. This separation of interaction area and shall we say advertising area strikes me as particularly strange. 
I was struck by the similarity to this and a number area namely  union station in Toronto. One revision the group I worked with had was that the signage timetable and advertising will become all merged. 

My primary reason for this was that at retirement times of peak usage the display would become all utilitarian. Advertising would dynamically give way when navigation and wayfinding became the primary goals of the station. This would have the added advantage for the advertisers of eliminating the so called banner blindness problem. 

Banner blindness is when people know that advertising sits in some portion of the environment and deliberately avoid looking at it. Think of it as cognitive information optimisation. 

so the idea of dynamically mixing information and advertising makes a huge sense from the advertiser.

So in the case of the coffee machine people will quite quickly learn to avoid looking at the adverts. Even today LCD panels don't come cheap so you are effectively adding cost without benefit. 

By combining both displays. Giving you the larger interactive space you improve things like the honeypot effect. Clearly the small black and white display is also touch sensitive. Provision of something as simple as a proximity sensor could easily switch between display as advertising and display as interaction surface.

A really smart coffee machine manufacturer. Would have a number of different adverts which could be dynamically displayed on the screen and then have each coffee machine making its own A/ B testing to see what information it could give to attract people to it.
this would allow the coffee machine to optimise itself for its own local environment. 

So yes a big improvement in usability and a big improvement in sales who could object to that? 


Friday, May 16, 2014

Talk at museum of London

My talk last night at the Museum of London seemed to go really well.
The opening was a sell-out (600 tickets gone). And lecturing in the Victorian gallery works really well. I was really too nervous to take any pictures during my talk, this photo is one I talk at a very excellent talk by Joe Wood. 

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Late events at the Museum of London

Late events at the Museum of London:



I’m giving a talk in London on digital London on the 15th as part of an event in the Museum of London


http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/london-wall/whats-on/adult-events/late-events/


Should be good. 

Thursday, April 3, 2014

BBC News - Oculus Rift provides a VR trip inside Game Of Thrones

BBC News - Oculus Rift provides a VR trip inside Game Of Thrones



I spent a lot of time in the 90s working on virtual reality. I even set up a masters course at UCL on it in the School of architecture (now rebranded to adaptive architecture). It was fun being in a virtual world, but no one ever managed to come up with the killer app for virtual reality. VR died but  the work wasn't wasted as most of the algorithmic improvements that have been made over the years appeared in the high-end 3-D gaming world.



It's kind of strange seeing a whole VR hype returning with Oculus rift. I think what I am most impressed about with the BBC item is that people are working on this as a new medium. It could be an incredibly amazing way to explore stories. 



So I am trying to get out of the feeling this is Groundhog Day. Maybe this time around with better graphics faster responses and simpler tools we can begin to deliver on some of the excitement that the first generation of VR experienced. 

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

My article for the conversation gets 1,967 readers.

You'll hardly notice the next generation of wearable tech



You'll hardly notice the next generation of wearable tech

By Nick Dalton, The Open University

On a trip to Germany, David Cameron has announced £45 million to prompt a “new industrial revolution” based on the internet of things. This marks the beginning of a new era for computing and for wearable technologies. We are entering the age of calm computing and devices that truly help us live. And they’ll be a lot more subtle than a computer stuck to your glasses.

Wearable technology has been the main feature of every technology trade show this year. Google has led the pack with Google Glass and Samsung is already on its second generation smartwatch in competition with smaller startups such as Pebble.

All of these technologies were predicted back in the 1990s by a researcher called Mark Weiser, then chief technology officer at Xerox Palo Alto research centre. And it’s to Weiser we can look when we think about what is going to happen next.



Something’s familiar here. Alan Kaye and the Dynabook.
Marcin Wichary, CC BY


Xerox PARC originally came up with the interface we use on most computers that combines mouse, window and menu, as well as Ethernet, the thick cable your desktop computer might be still attached to today. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, under then-director Alan Kay, PARC developed a vision of Dynabook, which is a good blueprint for today’s iPad and Android tablets.

It was up to Mark Weiser to develop a vision of computing which was as bold for the 1990s as Alan Kay’s vision of a tablet computer was for the 1970s.

Weiser followed the trends for computing and observed that the number of computers per person kept increasing. It began with one when people just used a personal computer. Then, in the 1990s, he noticed that when you surf the web, you are using three or four computers at once – one to look at the web page, one to serve the web page to you and normally a couple or more passing information over the internet. He predicted that the number of computers per person would keep increasing and he was right. Today, with cloud storage and smartphones and intelligent car management, you’re probably using up to 20 computers at any one time.

Weiser even foresaw the progressive miniaturisation and cost reductions that would enable you to use first hundreds, then thousands of computers simultaneously. He called this ubiquitous computing but many people in the tech industry have rebranded it the internet of things.

While in many ways this seems like a recipe for pandemonium, Weiser saw it as an opportunity to rethink how we interact with computers, making them recede into the background, something he called calm computing. By putting computers into things we can bring human values back to technology.

Not just gadgets

While Google Glass and intelligent sound systems for the home are the gadgets that most readily spring to mind when we talk about the internet of things, the future may well be more subtle and more functional.

Take for example the problem of living with dementia. Many retired people want to live independent lives for as long as they can, but their adult offspring constantly worry about their parents getting lost outside their own doorstep.

The current solution is a box worn on a belt which monitors the wearer’s location and can alert a friend or helper when the box moves outside a predefined area or has a panic button pressed.

The downside is that wearers can feel like the box acts as a visual mark of disability. They also need to remember to attach it to their belt before going out. The ubiquitous solution is to hide the computer within a walking stick that would be used anyway.

As Weiser predicted, the computer merges into the background of our lives. The user of this subtly hi-tech device will remember to take it with them when leaving the house using habitual memory so no extra learning is required.

A computer within the wooden stick might cause it to vibrate when the user walks beyond the limits of their habitual neighbourhood. It could vibrate again when pointed in the direction of home to help the user find their own way out of the predicament. A hidden button could be used to summon help, all without drawing attention to the user. Then, once the user has returned home, the stick can be charged in an umbrella stand, again negating the need to learn the new habit of plugging in a dedicated device.

The need for ubiquitous computing like this will spur the next generation of startups and innovation. University courses are emerging to support the next generation of developers that can make this happen and David Cameron’s £45-million funding boost will go a long way too. But strangely, if Weiser’s vision of calm computing is delivered as promised, the only way you will know it has worked is if you don’t see it.

The Conversation



Nick Dalton received funding from The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Lancaster experiment ending

Well the numbers of people mostly students at Lancaster University who have taken part in the experiment has reached a reasonable number. It's not wildly exciting but still reasonable to do some statistics with. With higher numbers we could do any statistical test we liked. With these numbers we will have two be more selective.


Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Alan Wells — UX Basics For Startups

Alan Wells — UX Basics For Startups



Some very good advice



Think in Flows, Not Screens

Understanding Mental Models

Don’t Re-Invent the Wheel

You Are Not Your User

Monday, March 17, 2014

Lancaster experiment continues ( badly)

I spent the morning phoning round departments they sent out emails to all the students. I've got 31 complete repsonses for 133 page checkouts. The words blood and stone come to mind. What's wrong with current students don't they like £100 ? 

Time is running out. I need close to 100 partipants and I'm about 30% of the way there. If this goes on for much longer then people will forget what they saw completly.  Also I can't run this experiment again here ( people would remember from last time).


Friday, March 14, 2014

Lancaster experiment going badly

We put the advert for £100 on the screens round Lancaster campus so far only 10 responses from 30000+ students for our survey after 2 days

I have a sinking feeling

King's College London: MRC SGDP Open Day - YouTube

This shows day job work of one of the Phd students I'm very pleased to be supervising along with Simon Holland.





Thursday, March 13, 2014

Kingscross

Spot the user interface.
How many user interfaces can you see below

I have 

Ticket machines
Cash points 
The big digital departure board
The animated displays
The computers on the help desk
The led read out on help desk
Mobile phones
Smart till in shop


Monday, March 3, 2014

Ubi - The Ubiquitous Computer

Ubi - The Ubiquitous Computer



Every time I talk to on human computer interaction folk and talk about the future of computers they always say "well in the future you will just talk to your computer and it will do it". I normally dismmiss this ( and I use voice alot) but if you really think this is true then this could be the computer for you.









<

new (NUI) book of the day

I found a new book on Amazon about NUI ( Natural User interface) design.



Large scale project failures with relation to user interface errors

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~johnson/papers/Rotterdam_Paper.pdf









I think this provides the differance between end user invovlement ( making them feel better) and user centered development ( the user is the heart of the project). Some Ok examples


Friday, February 28, 2014

Eye tracking

On Wednesday Uschi, Lijing demoed the desktop eye tracker.  I was presenting the mobile eye tracker I use for some of my more recent work to members of the open University staff as part of the open universities 'learn about fair'. I got this message from the organiser Graham Healing. 


"Each year visitors to the Fair tell us what their highlights were and this year the Eye tracking stall was selected by more students than almost any other stall so well done and many thanks."

Monday, February 24, 2014

My current top 10 papers.

1.Solutions for visibility, accessibility and signage problems via layered graphs
359
2.Collaboration and interference: Awareness with mice or touch input
342
3.Issues and techniques for collaborative music making on multi-touch surfaces
326
4.When the fingers do the talking: A study of group participation for different kinds of shareable surfaces
279
5.Running up Blueberry Hill: Prototyping whole body interaction in harmony space
204
6.Fighting for control: Children's embodied interactions when using physical and digital representations
202
7.Bricolage and consultation: addressing new design challenges when building large-scale installations
172
8.Neurodiversity HCI
118
9.Kolab: appropriation & improvisation in mobile tangible collaborative interaction
74
10.Ambient recommendations in the pop-up shop
49

This is a strange kettle of fish.The central open University repository ORO has given me a list of my top papers. Naturally this is a very strange order which is clearly effected by the year the paper came out (older better) and other sources of the download. It is promising that the neurodiversity paper is number eight despite being printed last year the deadline shop is already in the top 10 despite being A very new paper. Kolab still at nine which is a bit disappointing its a great paper and I would love to do more work with improvisation and tangible interaction if I could. Quite impressive that the two musicmaking papers are in my top three. I think the number one paper is the most interesting as it is one of the oldest papers on the collection.