Virtual architecture idea of the day.

Virtual architecture idea of the day.

1. Get two cameras to view scene in a remote location - in real time.
2. Using something like a Kinect find out where people are walking past a large display. 
3. Warp the two images so that the moving person sees the virtual location change perspective as they might expect to do so when walking past a 'hole in the wall'. 
4. does this give the impression of hole or is it seen as some kind of visual break down?
5. Does this make you feel like the other place is more there than the flat case ? 

Starfire - vision of the future (in the 80's)

I love visions of the future. They get it so right and wrong at the same time. This one comes from Tog's (http://www.asktog.com/starfire/ ) website and covers the Starfire interface for Sun. Lovely pre-internet version of the future.

Ignore the haircuts.

Global warming and usability

 A researcher at CHI2011 said what can usability do about global warming - an awful lot I said. An article has turned up proving my point. 


There is a good article in Scientific American showing that 

1. If you install a smart meter you don't get any energy savings instantly. 
2. Most people don't know how to change the settings on their smart meter to get any savings at all. 

This is basically a usability problem but the problem for a researcher like me is how to get a paper out about getting it right. 

The Microsoft Courier/Ditto

I just had to link to it. before the designers got there hands on it.
I thought the idea of something more like a pro version an Nintendo DS or the second generation onelaptop per child - you could use it like a laptop ( keyboard on one screen ) or a note book( with pen) or multi-touch ( like an Ipad). Most of these demos are using the two window approach ( which is still good ). 
Now the courier is dead these guys at Tapose are making a iPad version. Perhaps some smart and desperate tablet maker will see it and use it. 



and after

Touch scree scrolling

Interesting alternative to the normal pan based scrolling.
Is it just me or are people thinking that whole scroll bar thing on desktop GUI was a bad idea ?



I'm not 100% convinced this is better

More cool ways to do Iphone development.

UIkits video from UIkits on Vimeo.


Makes me want to link them to a code generator for some reason.

screen writing software

Ruth came back talking about a friend who wants to get on writing her novel and that got me to thinking about software for narative writing.

I have a look at a number of screen writing apps and found them quite interesting. I was thinking about how similar novel/script writing is to thesis writing - you have to keep a lot in your head. You have to keep notes and keeping non physical notes help.

1. The key feature is outlining. 
1. This highly top down approach strikes me as a bit odd in an industry which regards its self as creative. I think this top down only approach reminds me more of software engineering than unlimited creative 
2. The most important feature is export format
1. looks to be key, again you would think that getting the format output would be the least of the problems but no it looks to be what people mostly use the software for. 
3. Many have a card sorting section 
1. this is just a 2d version of the outlining
4. Most of the apps have some kind of library/reference section to hold additional material  
5. Most apps help you keep track of words used. 

Some of the apps have interesting additions

• Moive Outline has a number of interesting additions 
• Feeling factors a graph showing some aspect ( action, conflict, tension ) and how it changes over a section 
• A character section which tracks the personal arc on a scene by scene basis 
• using four questions 
• what does x need in this step 
• what does x get from this step 
• what conflict or dilemma  does X face in this step 
• how does this step move X's story forward. 
• a profile section which has a number of questions and an interview zone
• A relationships which plots the relationships ( by time I'm not sure)
• A todo list - This I've see this in netbeans and eclipse 
• Spotlight - which pulls all the dialog of X together so you can check the phrase of voice. 
• Scrivener is a mac program which handles the outliner stuff
• Has a nice way of working with fragments you can then reoganise   
• Nice snap shot mode. 
• Fullscreen mode 
• I wonder how many programs ( pages, and now scrivener ) have this full screen mode for when your concentrating on something. 

My problem is that with this software we still get strangely awkward plot lines - Tomb Raider, Sky Captain being my favourites.

Things I would like to see 

1. Something to help you generate people - suggest names, identities, back ground plots possibly lots of stock pictures to help form a mental image.
2. Something to help generate locations 
1. either cities, landscapes, rooms, feelings  
3. Something to interupt the casual flow of the plot 
1. perhaps the machine automatically adds in cards into the script which challenge the writer to throw away some thing. Perhaps the machine adds in things like 'the protagonist is a woman' or 'Incorporate river into the plot' or 'your hero is guilty'. Perhaps you see an evocative picture of something - a large tree. See the very excellent trvropes 
4. Something to help with language 
1. perhaps substitutes words or has some notion of the kinds of language a person might use. Perhaps has a dictionary for each person which limits the words they might know
2. I like the notion of having access to a good dictionary of similar words - pages and Word do this well enough. 
5. I guess what I might be looking for is the textual equivalent of the photo shop filter. You apply a filter to the narrative and the machine alters it in some random way and you evaluate it looking for inspiration. 

1. Storyworld  works quite nicely ( but its paper )  it has Propp like characters/events 
6. Character renaming - so if you change something like name/sex/nationality the software can go through substituting requires a link to the original charater rather than text.
7. Narrative arc - 
1. This for me would be a visualisation which lets you see each character and how they interact in each scene. 
2. A large character by character time line
3. Like a visual Vladimir Propp
4. The idea is to look for inconstancies in the plot 
8. Reading age check - for children's novels guesses the reading age 
9. A synomyn check - looks for and underlines words which are spelt correctly and sound the same as the real world 
10. A text to speech facility like Narrator which lets you listen to your dialog with two ( or more ) voices which lets you test your dialog out.
11. Lots of ways to look at things in new ways. Similar to the feeling facors in plot above. 
1. For example have lots of diffrent types of paper/fonts and get a notbook printed out look. 
2. 
   

All in all it makes you wonder what they do to come up with a plot for a visual effects intensive film. The highly non visual elements of the software makes you wonder. 

re-reading this I'm starting to wonder if this has anything to do with the inability to see the narrative in details for the the child protection people ( from A previous post ).  Also how we can track narrative while looking through large amounts of forensic document data ( I problem I've heard about and blogged about before too ) How can we best illustrate over all narrative in addition to text ? 

lost weekend

I've been writing a student exercise and began thinking about one writing a single user adventure now titled interactive fiction. The idear was to use hashmaps to represent each room, these would be read in from an xml file.

The things I wanted to do was create an audio game - use speech synthesis to get the text to be read out so you could play it on an iphone or something with your vision else ware.

I was chatting with Ruth and we both agreed the narrative and characterisation and mostly dialog in games is in my experience quite pitiful. So the notion would be to bring this to the centre of the game so you would focus your efforts on it.

So one thing irritates me about interactive fiction it all appears to be written in the first person "You see this, you see that". I thought it would be good do something in the third person ( Lara picks this up, Lara looked round the room to do this).

I think the second thing I liked the look of was introducing a companion who would travel with the main character to get more description out of her/him. In the case of doing a tombraider like interactive fiction I like the notion that someone goes with Lara and they don't get on.

"You want me to jump of this ? are you crazy, do I look insane to you or something".

Looking at the sites on how to write interactive fiction this appears to be a no no - it is thought to interfere with the game begin run by the player.

So looking around and after an excellent wikipedia article on audio games, strong disabled access notion. I'm not against this but I think with mobile audio systems a strongly audio game would be good. Most of the audio games require good use of live stereo sound to get positions.

I checked out the iTunes appstore and after a copy of advent (ure) there is nothing strongly audio game is ( lots of audio in games but nothing audio centric).

http://www.audiogames.net/page.php?pagefile=articles

Ruth and I thought it would be fun to have an augmented reality game where you operated like an adventure but you do this in the real world. So you create an alternative London but set in the spaces of the real one. Naturally you can still walk into any public part but inorder to go from one space to another in the adventure game and get an audio description you have to solve a puzzle(unlock a door, carry an item or something). I quite like this. I guess to be sure of it being interesting I would have to look at a lot of similar augmented reality games. The HCI lit is full of them for some reason.

I should really get on with some proper research but I might come back to this at a later date. No in the end i realised this was too complex for the M255 students to handle.

The command line strikes back.

I've been thinking about command lines for this unit I'm involved with. The idea was to show that command lines as an interface are not 'dead' just revised. Google was the obvious choice but wolframalpha is new and the video is quite impressive ( well I'm an engineer by background and habitually quantative ) . I think this is the first example of sematnic web doing something interesting.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

still has all the big problems with command lines though.

Lego Tangible interface

First shopping tangible interface I've found live.

You hold box up to the display and it projects a 3d model on to it ( you hold box up to the mirror and see the object projected on it )

Thinking.

I was reading this

1. B. Hillier, “Between Social Physics and Phenomenology: explorations towards an urban synthesis?,” in Proceedings of the 5th International Space Syntax Symposium, vol. 1, 2.

And started to make lots of links between Phenomenology/Ethnography and HCI. In essence David Seamon has made a lot of interesting noises about how the architectural theory space syntax links in with phenomenology mostly the phenomenology of space. Due to the focus on building from experience to create life in the streets. I see phenomenology/syntax as a very complementary views of the world. Hillier sees it as a bridge between phenomenology and social physics (his term).

I was talking about this with Paul and Riche saying how what I would like to do for HCI what syntax did for urban design. Effectively create a theory of object (software) which could be used analytically for design. Currently we operate from theories/practices of human (psychology) and society ( Ethnography ) which gives the computing people/designers little to contribute but interventions. Is this getting to the essence of HCI ( to use the phenomenology).

I guess what I'm looking for what is called space in architecture but for HCI. Space in architecture is a very abstract concept but is very familair (you by the building by the price per sqr foot), is not that which we build it is defined by what we build, it is what we build for and what architects think we respond to.

Richie said something interesting, when you are looking for a new house you look at the empty rooms and think what you can do with them. In HCI terms your looking for the affordances of the builds volume/void/space. But we don't talk about specific affordances the way space syntax can be specific and objective about space.

Going back to the rooms , when I look at Excel, or word don't think about what it is I think about what I can do with it. So Excel has a large 'interaction-space' for want of a better word. Clearly both Excel and Word set an agenda but are very flexible within in that realm. I'm still not sure what I mean.

Richie also had that zen moment about space defining the bowl. When you buy a bowl all it does is to define that space, with out that space it is not a bowl. Bill also talks about things forming from relationships of object, a table is just a number of chunks of wood until they form in a specific set of relationships. Perhaps the table is also the space it defines underneath it and above it.

I'm speculating but perhaps the space in things is the paths through the things we flow through when we use them. The orders of clicks and pages on a web site the sequences of clicks on a mobile phone. Are these paths essential uses of things are they part of our use of things?

M. recommended S. Todes, Body and world (MIT Press, 2001). to check out. Looks embodied.

Big Du

I've written before about audio interfaces now. Apple have produced the new shuffle with an audio interface ( primitive but its prime time). At first I wonderd that they had done speach syntetis on the pod its self ( nice ). Looking at the advert and I realise that the magic is all done on ITunes ( smart) but this does mean that Apple have released the first really big upgrade to the voices on the mac for a long time.

I'll try running Alex on some text to see what its like.

Lets see what this will lead to. I like the idea that we will see more audio interfaces on the other Ipods.

Tangible interaction idea of the day

Just finished reading the Tangible and embedded interaction proceedings ( including Simon's low hanging fruit paper gurrr). Did have one idea inspired by the original answering machine interface.

What would an email interface look like? Small ball to represent each email - could you colour code them to indicate aspects of the message ( urgent, from this group, contains X in the subject line... ) Could you build it for a group of people ( the secretaries for example) mix the RFID tag in the ball with a tracker that would display/project the subject line.

Zoomable is back

http://www.zoomify.com/

http://gasi.ch/blog/flex-multiscaleimage-component/

And deep zoom a microsoft image file format. 

More glassy idears

We had a meeting today about getting another study underway.  This time thinking about horizontal vs vertical spaces.

Afterwards I passed through the old department and saw a couple of foldable tables which might be nice to make a semi-portable reatavision table. 

Got to thinking about making a multi-touch surface using a projector against a large sheet of glass with tracing paper as the projection surface. Could we track fiducials in the IR from behind the glass. The problem is that the markers would not 'sick' to the vertical surface. Useful for manipulation but not objects. 

I'm wondering what kind of interface I could build with that - perhaps something for NATS. 

Jeff said something quite profound - we should stop thinking about technologies and think about user studies. 

I also worked on the audio interface as a relax/quickie paper. I think I have enough voices for a run through. 

Command lines

I was chatting to Paul about Ubiquity ( and the new google app). I said that ubiquity was just the new way of doing a command line. We talked about the benefits of command lines (large numbers of things you can do). I like the idea of reinventing the command line so verbs are shared (does Ubiquity do this?). 

For example LOOK at file calls 'more' and LOOK at folder calls 'ls' in unix speak. Paul suggested doing a command line version of Simon's direct combination. I quite like the idea. I think what makes Ubiquity work is that you are in a web browser and you have some kind of context which can help the program help figure out what to do. 

Wiki thoughts

I'm sitting in a meeting about Wikis (Wikies?). 

The thing that strikes me is that there are two features that would be useful which are not currently available. 

1. A view when you can see the text coloured by 

 a) who has edited this (last) 

         b) How old is the text being edited. 

2. We need a wiki based on CVS (or subversion). This way may people can edit simultaneously, with out locking. 

The other thought I find interesting is a web based editor to collaboratively edit code. 

Chi papers

Had a nice meeting with Yvonne and the others yesterday. General conversion about papers for Chi. Having spoken again with Paul we think that could be a good paper about the location of the new table. 

New table is to be simple but playful guide to location of people in the new building. Theory is we test it out and see how syntactical view of location applies - good sheep paper. 

Also Y. wants something quick measuring/visualising activity in building. I like notion of doing say slow trails of people + measuring network traffic+noise as an indication of how much people are present. Again I can rework this syntactically plus look at C.Raty stuff. 

Visit from City University

Just finished a demo to Dr Sara Jones and Professor Neil Maiden. They have a new Diamond touch table and where looking for people who had used them. 

I came in late ( working libary and lost time but Simon phoned me to remind me), but had a nice discussion about using tables/tangibles in the context of user interface elicitation. 

So this was the last in a row of three demos of the fishtable. 

Over lunch Neil mentioned having some contacts with web usability people and I mentioned my intreast in  finding click stream data AND eye tracking in games (apparently not done yet).

Mean while the wrong kind of silicon sheet was delivered - to thick and not squashy! Makes me wonder if working on the vision tracking is better approach. 

Next week are moving buildings! 

some more applications

I have been thinking that two applications I would like to build are a TableTop IDE for paired development (I'm told this is a bad idea so now I want to do it even more). 

The other one was a video observation table used by a group to label the observed actions.