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.