D. M. Frohlich. Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, chapter Direct Manipulation and Other Lessons, pages 463–488. Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, The Nederlands, second, completely revised edition edition, 1997.

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This chapter is a great literature review of direct manipulation, a class of graphical interfaces that allowed to be operated ‘directly’ using manual actions rather than typed instruction. Their main idea was to move interaction from dialogue to manipulation.

Schneiderman summarised direct manipulation in the following three principles:

1. continuous representation of the object of interest;

2. Physical actions or labelled buttons pressed instead of complex syntax;

3. rapid incremental reversible operations whose impact on the object of interest is immediately visible.

Hutchins et al. defined better what makes manipulation direct: directness equals engagement plus distance. Engagement refers to the locus of control of action within the system; distance refers to the mental effor reqired to trnaslate the goals into actions at the interface and then evaluate their effects.

The chapter reports a comparative review of the major studies concerning direct manipulation interfaces, dividing the studies in three groups: uncritical comparative evaluations; critical comparative evaluations; and naturalistic choice studies. In summary, the studies confirm some but not all of the proposed benefits of direct manipulation and show them to depend on implementation, task and measurement factors.

More recently, mised mode interfaces shifted the locus of the direct manipulation devate from whether direct manipulation is better than other forms of interaction to whn and how its benefits should be combined with other forms.

An interesting point is that the same kind of mixing of agent and model world attributes happens in a different way in computer mediated communication tools. In these cases the interface agents are other people who may act on a shared workspace or document whilst talking to you (Whittaker, Geelhoed, and Robinson, 1993).

Tags: human communication, human computer interaction, interaction design

In my current experiment we are investigating the effects of what we called the Task-context and the Conversation-context, on distance problem solving. The conversation-context, is the set of previous utterances which peers rely on to interpret the current utterance, and the task-context is the set of objects and the environment that the peers are talking about. Of course, the context of collaborative work also includes many other aspects such as shared backgrounds or institutional settings but we focus on these two sources of referencing. One could object that the task and conversation contexts are deeply intertwined from a cognitive point of view and form a single context. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of the interface, the task space and the conversation space often occur on the screen as two different areas.

To complete our experimental plan, we were in the need of a chat application that would not offer any support for both the conversation context (e.g., having an history of the conversation) and the task context (e.g., supporting references to the shared workspace). As I could not find an example of existing application with such features, then I decided to build my own, that I called ExtremeChat, named after the fact that using this communication application is an extreme experience.

ExtremeChat is very basic. The bottom pane is the composition area, where the message can be typed. Then it has a send button to post the message to the other client. The gray pane is the box showing our partner’s last message. Of course, sending a new message to our partner will erase the current message.

One technical note, ExtremeChat was implemented using PythonCard and it is largely based on the chat example.

I will release the code shortly.

Tags: human communication, human computer interaction, interaction design, programming, Python, research, research methodology

Pimentel, M. G., Fuks, H., and de Lucena, C. J. P. Co-text loss in textual chat tools. In 4th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT2003) (Stanford, CA, USA, June 2003), vol. LNAI 2680, pp. 483–490. [url]

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This paper present some basic statistics on the co-text loss, the phenomenon that occurs in a chat session when a participant does not establish a conversation thread.  According to the authors, co-text loss occurs each time the reader is unable to identify which of the previous messages provides the elements that are necessary to understand the message that is being read.

One of the identified cause of the co-text loss is the lack of linearity of a chat text. The authors propose two different tools that could be used to overcome this phenomenon: HyperDialog allows the users to structure their conversation in threads; and MediatedChat, where the user cn chose a specific turn-taking mechanism (e.g., free contributions, where each participant can send a message at any time; or circular contributions, where the participants are organized in a circular queque).

The author report that co-text loss is more likely to occur during free contributions. Precisely, during the branching-out phase of the free conversation other topics started to be discussed that made co-text more likely to occur.

Tags: collaboration tools, human communication, human computer interaction, text data mining

Emotiv announced the first brain computer interface technology that can detect and process both human conscious thoughts and non-conscious emotions. The technology, which comprises a headset and a suite of applications, allows computers to differentiate between particular thoughts such as lifting an object or rotating it; detect and mimic a user’s expressions, such as a smile or wink; and respond to emotions such as excitement or calmness.

Tags: human computer interaction, new technology

This is the title of the talk that Sister Judith Zoebelein gave at LIFT07. After some weeks from the conference, the echoes of the ideas she presented still resounds in my brain. New technologies push the limits of what is human-to-human communication, co-presence, ‘sharedness’, etc. The trend is clear: what used to be a actual experience is now a mediated event. If somehow this has clear advantages like the ability for communication to cross time and space, the same possibilities expose also to a wide range of threats. News are full of stories that shows the limits of the system: identity theft, identity loss, etc.

The talk of Sister Judith insisted on two points: the importance of symbols and the importance of an actual human encounter. The internet is full of symbols: replacements for the actual world. Sometimes this substitution is transparent and consensual for the user, sometimes is not. Sometimes this relief is necessary, sometimes is imposed to us by the technology, the society or the corporations that drives particular platforms.

This might led to confusion. Confusion on who I really am. Who am I? Am I, Mauro, the blogger? Am I the researcher? Am I the Second Life player? Maybe none of them. The point is that being virtual does not help me to understand who I really am. We understand our life in the interaction that we have with others in actual encounters. My virtual life put me in the center of the world: social = me first! Everything is about me, my contacts, my facebook, my flickr, my del.icio.us, my blog, … Everything becomes the projection of my self: an egoistic, egocentric projection.

I quote here some passages that I found extremely interesting:

The idea of a local parish which centers a people in a geographical area through worship, social outreach, and common lived experiences, is much less functional in many parts of North America and Europe.  There are many reasons, not in the least of which are the mobility of persons today, the changing social structure of towns and cities, the increase in all kinds of media for communications that keep people more “connected” in one way, and more isolated in other ways.  Today people find each other on the net, witness only all the “match.coms” that exist, and try to sell relationship from virtual contact.  How do these communities end up in some kind of actual encounter? Can the Internet foster a real life, person-to-person exchange, without an actual eye-to-eye and face-to-face contact?

…

Today’s young often get their “persona experiences” through the games and pseudo-communities available virtually. But then how do they leave this make-believe world and integrate that which they realized about themselves through gaming? Can their life really be changed for the better when they are away from the gamestick? Often what can happen instead is a unconscious confusion about which person I really am, the virtual or the actual, particularly if I don’t like my life very much.  Any community should give a greater sense of personhood, not less a sense of who the person is.  How much more this is true when it is virtual community and nothing real that tests the truth of my conclusions.

© Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist 2007

I share, with Sister Judith, a vision for new virtual communities that will lead to actual human encounters: “The anonymity of the Internet must at some point lead to the desire and opportunity for an actual human encounter. This, of course, is a basic tenet of the Church, that there must be a sacramentality to our lives.  We need to live in a concrete, shared dimension of human community. ”

Yesterday I was looking for a Pizzeria nearby. As I remembered the address I just wanted to see the map to orientate myself to reach it. As I had a couple of spare minutes I tried to look it up on three different map services to compare the different features offered. I chose Google Maps, Microsoft Live Local, and Yahoo Maps. The three services have comparable features … on the surface. Below the surface their philosophy is completely different.

Google Maps is an extreme open Geographical Information System. Their gazetteer is really good in parsing the query string and looking up the right place. However the site poorly support Annotations: it is possible to save the location but is not possible to define groups of annotations or to share them. The web site clearly says: please mash me up with something else!

Yahoo Maps is USA-centered. It could not find the address I  was looking for in Switzerland. Their interface is ADS oriented but the support to save different location is right visible from the home page. I am not sure that is possible to create groups of annotations.

The most comprehensive and user-oriented service is Microsoft Local Search. The interface offer really interesting features like integration of 2D and 3D browsing of the maps (while Google has two separate platform for that), annotations and collections. A collection is a group of pushpin that can be shared or tagged for different purposes. Their web interface allows also to create polygons areas on the map, draw lines, etc.

In sum the winner, IMHO, is Microsoft Live Local, which offer the most comprehensive set of features. The interaction is certainly more rich and offer customization and sharing possibilities that the other services does not offer. One of the missing features though is a strong connection with portable devices. It would be great if I could somehow bring these annotations with me, ready to be used while on the road. Also, the social networking side is clearly underdeveloped. We are seeing just the beginning of annotation sharing.

Tags: geographical serach, geography, interaction design, Location Based Services, map algorithms, maps

The Swedish furniture company IKEA has understood that the success key is to make the costumers’ shopping experience like play. The transformed the showrooms in gigantic playgrounds where grown-ups can spend their time. One of the recent add-on I noticed was a desk-sized construction kit to compose your kitchen. Each wooden brick has a magnetized back surface that is used to put it in place in a kitchen model board. All the bricks, of course, have scaled-sizes of IKEA furniture elements.

Very smart!

Tags: constructivism, marketing, tangible interface

Reading the latest RTDinfo (Magazine for European Research), I learned about the COGAIN project: a consortium of European universities and industry. COGAIN focuses on improving the quality of life for those whose life is impaired by motor-control disorders, such as ALS or CP:

COGAIN assistive technologies will empower the target group to communicate by using the capabilities they have and by offering compensation for capabilities that are deteriorating. The users will be able to use applications that help them to be in control of the environment, or achieve a completely new level of convenience and speed in gaze-based communication. Using the technology developed in the network, text can be created quickly by eye typing, and it can be rendered with the user’s own voice. In addition to this, the network will provide entertainment applications for making the life of the users more enjoyable and more equal. COGAIN believes that assistive technologies serve best by providing applications that are both empowering and fun to use.

One of the output of the project is the application called Dasher. Dasher is a information-efficient communication system driven by continuous pointing gestures. Instead of using a keyboard, the user writes by continuous steering, zooming into a landscape painted with letters. Dasher can be driven by a regular mouse, by touch-screen, or by gaze-direction. Dasher uses a language model to reduce the number of gestures needed. Anything can be written, and well-predicted phrases can be written fastest. The language model can be trained on any documents, it learns as the user writes, and Dasher works in any of the languages of Europe. With practice, users can write at 25 words per minute via a gaze-tracker.

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

REFERENCES:

[1] Aula, A., Majaranta, P. and Räihä, K.-J. (2005). Eye-tracking Reveals the Personal Styles for Search Result Evaluation. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2005, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3585, Springer-Verlag, September 2005, 1058-1061.

[2] Böhme, M. and Barth, E. (2005). Challenges in Single-Camera Remote Eye-Tracking. In 1st Conference on Communication by Gaze Interaction (COGAIN), Copenhagen, Denmark.

Tags: eInclusion, new technology, eye-tracking

An interesting study conducted by Stephane Birrer, at the University of Lausanne, shows how to infiltrate the scammer’s mailbox with a spyware able to publish the IP address from which the person is operating. The algorithm was also used to reveal the organization behind one of the famous Nigerian Scam.

More here (in French).

I enjoyed Luis von Ahn‘s Google tech talk on human computation. Human computation is not something new, as always, somebody else worked on it. From wikipedia:

In computer science, human-based computation is a technique when a computational process performs its function via outsourcing certain steps to humans. This approach leverages differences in abilities and alternative costs between humans and computer agents to achieve symbiotic human-computer interaction. In traditional computation, a human employs a computer to solve a problem: a human provides a formalized problem description to a computer, and receives a solution to interpret. In human-based computation, the roles are often reversed: the computer asks a person or a large number of people to solve a problem, then collects, interprets, and integrates their solutions.

In the talk, Prof. von Ahn presented a couple of interesting statistics: first humans spend an horrible amount of time playing solitaire, a game as useless as that (btw, I am not part of this statistic): in 2003, about 9 billion human-hours were spent on this game. By contrast, only 7 million human-hours were spent building the Empire State Building. Von Ahn pointed out that if we could create games that besides being entertaining could also have a purpose, then we could be much better off.

Another premise for his work is the fact that there are lots of computational problems that are unsolved, as for instance, the spam and how to prevent illicit use of network resources. Spammers use bots to register thousands fake email addresses from which spreading spam mail. Distinguish a bot from a real human is an example of unsolved computational problem. To circumvent this it is nowadays a standard to use CAPTCHA: we take a string of random letters and we render these in an image in a process which is impossible to reverse … for a machine. On the other hand, humans are very good in pattern recognition, so we use this trick to distinguish a man from a machine.

The point of the talk was: what if we use this human ability to solve other problems that computer are not good in solving and that can be far more useful than preventing spam? For instance one of the unsolved problem is how to index an image. At the moment we use the keywords contained in the filename of the image. This is really dumb but sometimes works. But what if we put images in a game context and we ask players to tell us what is inside the image and we use this description to index the image? That was the point of the ESPGAME that Prof. von Ahn et al implemented. In the game two players randomly matched on the internet are asked to independently look at an image and give some keywords for that image. As soon as they agree on a keyword then that keyword is taken as good and the players are given some points.

I wont go in details here, as the video is explicit enough on the mechanisms of that and other marvelous games. The talk also reports incredible results from the running experiment: 75,000 players have provided 15 millions labels for images. Here I want to argue on another point. As Tim O’Reilly argued on the last column of Make, each game has a purpose, not only in the way suggested by von Ahn. Mr. O’Reilly says:

I liked von Ahn’s phrase, “games with a purpose,” but of course all games have a purpose, not merely those that put us to work helping out our computers. Play is so central to human experience that historian Johan Huizing suggested that our species be called Homo ludens, man the player. … What makers understand is that play is as important as work. It’s not just as we pass the time, it’s how we learn and explore. … We play to learn. What we make when we play is ourself.

I want to extend von Ahn phrase suggesting that each game should have a double purpose: we can help the machine while we learn and we make things. Playing solitaire is a waste but its relaxing and maybe fun. It is definitely not useful other than for the player. The best would be to make games which are fun, useful for the society because while we play we accomplish something, and useful for ourselves, because while we play we learn something.

I wish I could see examples of this last category. Anybody?

REFERENCES:

[1] Luis von Ahn, Shiry Ginosar, Mihir Kedia and Manuel Blum. Improving Image Search with Phetch. To appear in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2007.

[2] Luis von Ahn. Games With A Purpose. In IEEE Computer Magazine, June 2006. Pages 96-98.

[3] Luis von Ahn, Ruoran Liu and Manuel Blum. Peekaboom: A Game for Locating Objects in Images. In ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2006. Pages 55-64.

Tags: education, human computer interaction, learning technology, machine learning, pedagogy, user experience