- Currently Listening to:
- Albert Niland — Wuthering Heights
Say hello to my little friends.
I got word in April that my first paper, the alluringly-titled “Collaborating in Context: Immersive Visualisation Environments” which I submitted in March to the Context in Advanced Interfaces workshop at AVI06, had been accepted. So, Mark, Mike and I headed off to Venice for the week to watch presentations, ride around on boats and eat octopuses.
The paper concerns the design and development of our unique visualization lab here in UCD. My presentation at the workshop went fairly well, considering I had completed a cross-city dash minutes before starting (Venice is a big place!). My slides are available with the others at the workshop’s results page. My paper has been published in the ACM digital library.
AVI 06 proper was an excellent conference, with plenty of interesting work going on, and people to meet. My trip report is available:
![[PDF]](/blog/media/pdf-icon.png)
Trip Report: AVI 2006 May 23–26, Venice Italy
Our own photos are online, and you can also check out the very lovely Geoffrey Ellis’ AVI photos (spot the goons!).
While looking into the possibilities of the Source SDK, specifically the FacePoser program, I had an idea that may or may not be useful. The SDK contains an assortment of tools for creating realistic human characters; characters that look, move and emote like real people. This goes as far as a very impressive facial expression modeller.
The characters that are created for games like Half Life 2 are very convincing. So, my idea was to create a human character (dressed in a lab coat and carrying a clipboard), who would stand beside the model of whatever autonomic system I was simulating. As the simulation wears on, the character will speak, and emote, various feedback cues to the user, like flailing his arms around when sensors fail. What more intuitive form of feedback than one which everyone is most used to having to interpret?
The trick, of course, is to not let this become a more technologically advanced version of Clippy. The character, who could be thought of as an avatar for the autonomic system’s general health, would generally stay in the background. Much of the feedback he provides could even be picked up subconciously, as he walks around the car performing ‘checks’; all the while providing subtle auditory hints and contorting his face to show his level of contentment.
Of course, there are some faces that no amount of technology could ever emulate.
- Augmented Social Cognition: How to reduce the cost of doing user studies with Crowdsourcing
One problem we have been facing as HCI researchers is how to get user data such as their opinions or relevance judgements quickly and cheaply. I think we may have a good way of doing this with Amazon Mechanical Turk with crowdsourcing that we're about to report in the CHI2008 conference.
- » IxDA Dublin. One year on.
- Mail’s Email Aliases, and Complexity Hidden - Release Candidate One
How many minutes does an average user (or worse, a novice user) spend reading a label describing a confusing concept, trying to figure out what the hell it does, before asking their Computer Friend for help or skipping it entirely? One might ask how many people are desperately looking for a Minimize All item in OS X’s Window menu, not realizing they need to hold the ⌥ key. And if there were such a menu item, one might ask how many people would waste time reading it when they don’t need it, and how many people would hit it by mistake.
- INNOVATION INTERFACE SERIES: Liam Bannon, Intel Corporation | Science Gallery
Liam Bannon is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems and Director of the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick. His research interests range over the gamut of human-technology relations, including cognitive ergonomics, human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, computer-supported collaborative learning, new media and interaction design, information systems development, and social dimensions of new technologies.
- YouTube - CHIstory
If I have seen farther, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants...and then I looked down at those giants and saw the silly videos they made back in the day.
CHI Video Showcase 2009.
- iHCI 2010
- ignore the code: Spatial Thinking
- ignore the code: 10/GUI
R. Clayton Miller's 10/GUI is probably one of the most dramatic reimaginations of the desktop user interface I’ve seen in a long time. This concept proposes a multitouch interaction system that does not require a multitouch screen (and thus does not have to deal with all the problems such a screen causes), but instead uses a multitouch area near the keyboard. The proposed graphical user interface makes full use of this multitouch area.
- The Future of Mice (If There Is One) - multitouch - Gizmodo
- BumpTop 3D desktop enhancement: Organize, customize, be productive
- teehan+lax » Blog Archive » iPhone Needs a New Home
- Daring Fireball: Highly Selective
- Call Me Fishmeal.: Pimp My Code, Part 16: On Heuristics and Human Factors
Heuristics are the key to designing programs that work well with humans, that make humans smile. In college computer science classes, we learn all about b*trees and linked lists and sorting algorithms and a ton of crap that I honestly have never, ever used, in 25 years of professional programming. (Except hash tables. Learn those. You'll use them!)
- Guide to a Successful HCI Archive Submission
- CHI 2010 Submission Types
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