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."

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

102550all

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. 

Masters project of the day Finding a Product's Cool Factor

 Finding a Product's Cool Factor - The Accelerators - WSJ



This is an interesting attempt at trying to measure what makes a product cool. The basic methodology was getting people to pick their cool products and talk to you about them. Then doing an analysis of the products and conversations to see if there were any factors which emerged from these products. Given the descriptions of the article I think the one thing they've  did was just identified popular products. Or rather the overall recommendations they give you are just recommendations for good software.



 I think a better methodology would get people to pick five cool products and five uncool products get them to talk about each and then try to identify factors that were unique to cool products.

UX Café: UX for developers by Ian Kynnersley 24/7/13

Some wise words.

Sympius the masters project of the day

Sympius

So I masters course would be o test if this was a better form of text entry than anything else.

NESTA

I am at NESTA CONFERANCE on digital art. 

Intreasting talk on difficulty building of building augmented reality app

For Nottingham museum?. Nice

Embodiment

Odd thought about all these truncated explanations about embodiment. The notion that being a body influences our cog native processes - suggests to some that intelligence requires a body. First this carrys with it the comforting notion that computers will never think( no bodies) but also has over tones that those with less bodies ( no arms , no legs ) are less able to think. Proof that alitttle knowledge can be a dangerous thing. 

Vessel | Mobile AB Testing.

Vessel | Mobile AB Testing.



Cool - perfect just what I need but you won't be able to download and get a test done in 30 days on App store. Close but no banana.

Watch "TEDxBerkeley - David Rose - Enchanted Objects" Video at TEDxTalks

Watch "TEDxBerkeley - David Rose - Enchanted Objects" Video at TEDxTalks:

   



If someone was writting a new course on Ubicomp then this would be quite useful.

Learning improvisation

One item which emerged from a PHD tutorial recently was this article on the BBC website about neuroscience and learning.

The basic argument was that people could use more dopamine when facing uncertain rewards. That is if you give out points for people remembering items in a lesson then they will remember more if they get uncertain rewards. I think my idea was that one of the reasons people like the act of improvisation was that they get more rewards from the uncertainty of the outcomes of improvisation. This was primarily improvisation in a musical context but I was struck by how much people like the freedom to improvise their own kinds of methods of winning computer games. Indeed this seems to be late well to the notions of flow. 

In flow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) there must be clear objectives and signs of progress, clear and immediate payback and good balance between perceived challenges and perceived skills. "One must have confidence that he or she is capable of doing the task at hand". So it seems to me that the pleasures of musical improvisation may be related to the notion of flow. I can relate to this strongly as I frequently get strong 'flow' while programming. I would posit that what people get on free improvisation is the same kind of physical reward that one gets from flow.

Hyper card - it's back and developing Iphone apps!

LiveCode | Developers



I quite like the historical irony of this. HyperCard was originally designed to be the Interface for the original Newton( smart PDA). It succeeded as being one of the best applications on the Mac. In fact Douglas Adams one used it as being one of the three things which might impress an alien archaeologist looking over the remains of the earth. ( I think the quote was the wheel, Mozat and hypercard... not bad).



Now hype HyperTalk the language behind HyperCard has been reinvented as an open source language and has been used to develop a cross platform Mobile development system called liveCode.



Four example in a button you would have the text



on MouseUp

 ask "hello world"

end mouseUp



I liked hyper talk as it broke the Vice like grip over the necessity to have something for programming which is like  mathematics. This strong mathematical influence on programming notation was paccording to inventor of Hypertext had Nelson urely a historical accident . HyperTalk used entirely English like syntax but in a  natural way, unlike other attempts at English language interfaces like COBOL.



I liked this because if you didn't know the syntax for something you can just say it out loud and that was formerly the right syntax.



Four example if someone said how do I put the contents of a URL into a variable the code would be.



put URL "http://www.thepurehands.org/page.html" into pageText 



I like HyperTalk because it opened up the world of programming to everybody ( like Scratch)



Well I haven't tried it but live code looks to be really fun definitely worth a go with.

Software Engineering Vs Engineering and what it means for HCI.

Just Say No | profserious the blog of software Engineer  Anthony Finkelstein has just been musing on the differances between software engineering and engineering.



I do like the the elements "First, complexity and scale are different in the case of software systems: relatively functionally simple software systems comprise more independent parts, placed in relation to each other, than do physical systems of equivalent functional value. " 

I guess my big problem has always been what is the difference between human computer interaction ( or design ) and the design of interaction with  of other everyday items. Please where are large overlaps but what are the differences? There was one book on human computer interaction I remember reading which failed to use the word computer for the first hundred pages.

"Third, software systems operate in a domain determined principally by arbitrary rules about information and symbolic communication whilst the operation of physical systems is governed by the laws of physics."



Again this is interesting in that form the design notion we can't have form follows function. Anthony also ignores the fact we have electronic and electrical engineering with not problem.





"Finally, software is readily changeable and thus is changed, it is used in settings where our uncertainty leads us to anticipate the need to change."

This is one of the elements which I found the most intreasting. Yes we do use software when we expect change and want to easily accommodated it. So I guess user interfaces are something we build when we expect what is to be controlled will change frequently. stimulating and stuff