The Inmates are Running the Asylum(Part 1)

I found it ironic that the author criticized the programmer for making software that was suited or customized for him and yet a major part of the book was about things that were not intuitive for the author.  In other words, the author assumed that was he wanted as an end user was what everyone else wanted, but what the programmer wanted in a software couldn't possibly be what everyone wanted.

To be honest, it seemed like the first two chapters were complaints from a guy who can't figure out how to work anything electronic in his life, but I do like how he stressed the importance of planning for user interaction at the beginning and having that be a key to a product's marketability.

It was also kind of cool to get a better understanding of what exactly creates user loyalty.  I think this is why people will stick with things like iTunes or Google's search engine.  Users feel no need to explore other options because they feel like the original met their needs precisely both in capability and desirability.

HeartBeat: An Outdoor Pervasive Game for Children

by

Remco Magielse
Panos Markopoulous
Eindhoven University of Technology

Heartbeat is an experiment into how sensing the heart rate of children could promote outdoor activity, specifically outdoor augmented reality games called "pervasive games".  Pervasive games are games that use technology such as wifi or gps to augment reality such as the game Human Pacman.

Unfortunately, games like this require the user to be "head down" which mean facing down to look at the technological device which can lead to decreased engagement with others.  This is not preferable for the development of children and not a perfect solution to the rise of video game consoles, which restrain the children to be in a single room.

Heartbeat is considered a "heads up" game that requires little visual attention from children and allows them to interact more with their environment and peers.

The game is a variation of capture the flag with two teams: the attackers and defenders.  Children hide at the beginning of the game and then all hand held devices are broadcast with a randomized role distribution.  Each of the attackers try to tag the defending team's device to transfer them over to the attacking team.  One defender is given a special treasure to protect during the game.

The game was played at a local park and in a local forest near the school the kids were from. Games were limited to 4 minutes. If the defending team did not get caught during that time then they won.

The actual prototype for the game was a device strapped around the chest to measure heart rate. When the players heart rate passed the threshold heart rate(in this case 100bpm) the player's device would beep at a rate consistent with the player's heart rate alerting others to their presence.  They ran two different trials, one with where the team member's hardware would beep every 1.5 seconds and one where the team member's hardware would beep in sync with their heartbeat.

Overall it seemed that children did not show any significant difference in physical activity. They stated that there was no substantial increase in physical activity with or with out the heart beat sensor. Also, the children had mixed reviews on whether or not they appreciated the beeping sound aspect of the game.

Paper

Discussion:
I feel like the game was not designed well to incorporate heart rate sensing into the design.  To be honest, it seemed like the aspects that the authors said went well about the experiment seemed to be aspects of a normal outdoor game and not about the augmented aspect of the pervasive game.

The Voicebot: A Voice Controlled Robot Arm

Authors: Brandi House, Jonathan Malkin, Jeff Bilmes

Summary:  In the past, those that were severely physically impaired had few options for assistance in day to day activities. Normally they would have to rely on the assistance of others, but this introduces an inconvenient dependency on others. Voicebot seeks to improve the independence of individuals with severe motor impairment by allowing them to use their voice to control a robotic arm.

Joint Movement Studies
Three methods were used to control the arm: the Forward Kinematic Model, the Inverse Kinematic Model, and the Hybrid Model. The FK model had the user control each joint one at a time. This was really easy to implement because user input is directly sent to the robotic arm. The IK model has the user just control the gripper(called the effector) and the joints move accordingly. The Hybrid model, however, uses IK to move the shoulder and elbow and then FK to move the wrist. Since any point can be reached using only two of the three joints, they had the shoulder and elbow joint move using IK and the wrist joint move using FK.

A test was done to move a ball using a simulated 2D arm to 4 sequential locations.  Apparently 3/5 of the users did better with IK and 2/5 of the users did better with FK. None seemed to prefer the Hybrid model.

The findings were extended to a 3D robotic arm. Users would use the "ck" sound to switch between Position mode(gross detail) and Orientation mode(fine detail).  The "ch" sound closed or opened the gripper.  The robotic arm had 5 degrees of freedom(shoulder rotation,shoulder bend, elbow bend, wrist rotate, and wrist
bend.) Only three can be changed at a time so movement was separated into Position mode(gross detail) and Orientation mode(fine detail). In Position Mode the shoulder movements and elbow bend were activated and in Orientation mode the wrist was activated.

This time the arm was tested with users unfamiliar with the device.  They were taught how to control it and the results are as follows:

All the users were able to finish but several complained about how difficult it was.  Changing by pitch was significantly difficult and there were several false positives for the "ch" or "ck" sound.

paper

Discussion:

I guess this seems like a cool novel idea, but it seems like it still has a long way to go to be practical.  As I was reading it seemed like there would be better ways to emulate arm movement that through vocal stimulation of a robotic arm.

Perceptual Interpretation of Ink Annotations on Line Charts

Summary:  When giving a presentation on a chart like the one above, one would typically draw an arrow to annotate the visually salient parts of the graph that attention needs to be drawn to.  However, what would be optimal would be to highlight a certain part of the graph as well but this kind of detail would be impossible to implement on the fly during a presentation.  What the researchers behind this paper have done is utilize Gestalt's laws of visual perception to take an educated guess at what the presenter wants to highlight and does the tedious work for them.  In this case it would find the peak that the arrow is pointing to and high light that peak or find the decline that was marked and highlight that portion of the line.

This technology would have several implications or possible extensions. If a corresponding data table is paired with a chart, finding what part of the graph is being highlighted could also highlight the corresponding data within the data table.

The way this was approached was to divide charts into maxima, minima, and slopes.   They classified strokes as either parallel or roughly orthogonal. They assumed parallel strokes would generally highlight slopes and orthogonal strokes would generally highlight entire peaks or valleys.

Discussion:

I feel like the concept as it is is very limited in application.  As it stands, it only works with line graphs and the researchers themselves said that they needed to conduct more research to see if their research was effective.  I would like to see the concept extended to apply to general annotations because I feel like this would aid in school lectures especially when having to draw attention to minute details with in complex and intricate schematic such as a certain part within a circuit diagram.

The Design of Everyday Things

Starting with the beginning chapter of this book I was a bit skeptical.

"When you have trouble with things--whether it's figuring out whether to push or pull a door...it's not your fault. Don't blame yourself: blame the designer."  

Personally, I can understand the occasional mishap where you pull where you should push, but to make a general assumption like "When you have trouble with things...blame the designer" is a bit drastic.  There will always be at least a small learning curve for every device including doorknobs and light switches.  There will always be someone distracted enough to not make it through that learning curve, so there will always be someone on which blame can be attributed.

As for the rest of the book, the author brought up very interesting aspects of the design of everyday things and he achieved his goal that I will not see the design of everyday things the same way.  However, I don't believe he needed to be so verbose about it.  I appreciated the thought that went into the psychology behind making mistakes, but I felt like the first third of the book could have been condensed into 2 pages.

Overall, I did enjoy this book despite its verboseness. Like I said, the author did accomplish the goals he set forth in the beginning.  I definitely see design a little differently and will probably stop to think about optimal design of an object before trying to understand its functions completely.

Ethnography: Efficient Parking Lot

My idea for an ethnography is to study parking lot behaviors among the students that park in Lot 50.  After gathering lots of data on the way in which a parking lot fills its spaces I'd like to be able to answer the following questions:

1. Is it more time saving to park at the far end or wait for a spot to open up?
2. If it depends, then when are the best times to wait for a spot and when are the best times to just suck it up and park at the end?
3. What is the average time it takes a really good parking spot to be reoccupied?
4. In what order or pattern are the parking spots taken?
5. How aggressive are drivers when it comes to getting a good parking spot?