I always have a kind of negative reaction to these sorts of interfaces.
What I tend to see in this demo is how to make a doorknob unintuitive, how to make music player functionality undiscoverable, how to accidentally lock yourself out, how to frustrate a user whose mental model of the sensor is incorrect.
I realize you have to approach new technology and interaction paradigms optimistically, but all I can think of is my own frustration when an ill-considered neato-feature is foisted on me when I least want it.
Like blue LEDs and touch sensitive buttons that lack a physical button (eg atmel q-touch).
I once got a recommendation for "The design of everyday things" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman...) with a warning: It will break the world for you, because you'll go around noticing how things are designed counter-intuitively, requiring large signs to explain what should be obvious. A good example: "Push"/"pull" signs on doors. Multiple branches of humanity independently developed the ability to design doors that any other human that understands the concept of a door can figure out how to open. Then, suddenly, around 50 years ago, that knowledge apparently vanished, and we started to have to put big "how to use" instruction stickers on one of the simplest and most intuitive objects ever invented.
It may be that many things are counter intuitive, but it seems calling out doors as something that has ever been intuitive is fallacious. Perhaps they used to be more consistent, but it doesn't take a lot of effort to find horrific accidents that happened years ago because doors weren't designed well.
Not to mention, watching my kids learn different doors has been amusing. I would think intuitive is the wrong word, so much as simple determination will get you through most any door.
It seems more likely that around 50 years ago the technology and literacy rates had finally advanced enough that push/pull signs could be easily attached to commonly used doors.
Yes, I exaggerated on artistic license, maybe a bit more than the anecdote could carry. That doesn't change the fact that a door that adults in a civilized country needs written instructions to operate is completely and utterly broken.
I still disagree that this is at all a new found thing. There is a reason building codes had to be drafted requiring exits to open out on buildings, after all. (So, really, the design of the door shouldn't even matter. Adults can remember that the main doors open out, right? :) )
I mainly question if it is truly a sign of a problem, as seems implicated by it being brought up. Still seems to me that it just happens because the cost for doing so is essentially nil.
The fire exit issue is a separate one: The reason emergency exits need to open out is that you can't count on being able to take a step back and open the door in a panic. In non-panic situations (practically all of them), doors work equally well opening in or out.
Yeah, but my point is two fold. First: Exterior doors to a building open out, pretty much period.* So, the handle is moot. If people really gave much thought to doors, they would be able to remember that, regardless of the handle.
Second: The reason for the exterior doors to open out is rather obvious (once you've considered the reason). Yet it was not originally in building code. This implicates that many places do it "wrong." Or, at least, they did years ago.
The first claim really just leads to "most people do not pay attention to such every day things." Even if you get it wrong, you only lose a second at a door. The penalty just isn't high.
The second is to say that it isn't like people were making flawless doors in the past. (Though, I particularly dislike "pocket" doors. I think those have fallen out of favour, thankfully.)
* Of course, I look at my house door and remember that residence entrances open in. Maybe that fundamental inconsistency is the true culprit here... :) I realize there is a good reason to keep the hinges internal to a house. So... not sure what to say about that.
Emergency doors (not "exterior doors" as a whole) are to open out because there might be a barrage on them in an emergency. Your house door isn't likely to experience a barrage (or rather, the fire code forbids you from having too many people in your house, partly because it isn't fitted with proper emergency exits for crowds).
This has nothing, what so ever, to do with whether or not a door is intuitively designed. Also, whether or not you lose a second opening a door is irrelevant (and you've just given the excuse for 1990's enterprise software UX - as long as it's possible to complete a task, who cares if it's easy or intuitive. Everyone, it turns out, but it took a while to hammer that point int).
The point is that "we" have the knowledge to design a door that is clearly and immediately usable (without losing a second) by anyone who's ever used a door - but sometimes "we" apparently chose not to use it. That is the conundrum outlined.
I know it isn't exterior doors as a whole. But the vast majority of doors you will encounter on a public building have to be usable in an emergency. So, I think you'll be hard pressed to find one that doesn't open out. (Again, unless you drop into residential doors.)
Your point that we have the knowledge to make doors that are immediately usable is just something I don't believe. I've seen people use doors incorrectly that fit the guidelines of that book. Hell, I think I've done so myself. And, I argue that this is almost completely related to the consistency of how a door opens. Not the handle. (e.g., after years of living in a high rise where the entrance opened out and all I did was go to public buildings where all doors open out, not too shockingly, I was more prone to opening house doors incorrectly.)
My argument was never that "so long as it is possible..." The argument I put forth was more that the cost for getting a door wrong is ridiculously low, so people don't put that much thought into it. On either side of the isle. (Well, designers want doors to be pretty.) Your 90s example is attacking things where the cost was actually high, but the designers didn't care.
I think you can basically sum up my viewpoint with the common attack on intuitive designs that nothing is truly intuitive in and of itself. Pretty much everything is leveraged on something you have previously learned. If it seems intuitive, it is really just familiar. In the case of doors, the familiar behaviour trumps any design decisions. (If you have some good studies against this, by all means I'm game to read them. More than just the book that started this thread, though.)
I used to work at a hospital with an automatic elliptical revolving door (I assume it was designed that way so you could push a gurney through it). On the one hand: automatic revolving door, shiny! On the other hand: they had to post a sign telling people how to walk through it.
A tech demo is a tech demo, it shows what is possible, not what is necessarily feasible to market to the big public as a new UI metaphor. Often it takes a long time to perfect something. So no need to be negative. Don't confuse it with a commercial of something that is actually brought to market.
I agree concerning it just being a tech demo. On the other hand, with the tech I've watched, and that I've been involved with, the market application is fairly close to the academic conception. Figuring out a feasible use case often comes a long time after the commercial introduction, if ever.
I get the feeling in certain cases, it's technology in search of a problem. That's ok (and even necessary) as long as I don't have to put up with it shoehorned in places it doesn't really fit.
in academic research that's the rule rather than the exception. The nature of research makes it very hard, even impossible, to predict what is going to have applications in the future and what those will be. To name an example, touch screens were also written off as an (awkward) curiosity for decades.
I agree with the "I hope it isn't forced on me", but that's a wholly different discussion. That's a common theme with technology: in the beginning you can choose and it all seems great, later on you're considered odd if you opt out because "everyone is using it". But that's not the fault of the researchers or of the technology, but of the way society handles it.
> What I tend to see in this demo is how to make a doorknob unintuitive, how to make music player functionality undiscoverable, how to accidentally lock yourself out, how to frustrate a user whose mental model of the sensor is incorrect.
The same could be said about touch technology. And usually is, for the first week someone uses it the first time. My friend, a good sysadmin, was often asking me how am I able to figure out how those Android interfaces work, then the other day he got an iPhone, and he was complaining and complaining... until he stopped, after a week or so.
I think discoverability is a bit overrated. Lots of things around us are bad at it, and people learn by showing to each other how to use the stuff. And as long as stuff behaves predictable, we can quickly grasp the patterns, no matter how nonintuitive or counterintuitive they are.
Or maybe I'm wrong, given how often I have to show people how to do things like setting the timer on the microwave or reconfiguring a VCR or whatever, given that they own it for like half a year and for me it's a first time I see a particular model (or sometimes even entire class of devices) and I don't have (nor have a need for) a manual. I don't know, maybe some people have troubles building mental models based on reasonable expectations about what a machine can do (I observed it strongly in one case). Anyway, I'm surprised by this phenomena, given that I once had to show to a good sysadmin how to set a clock on his microwave, 'cause he couldn't figure it out (and long he tried).
The only thing more satisfying than a duct-taping or LED-ectomy is the idea of finding the designer and "re-educating" them... in a deep, dark pit, lit only by blinking, ultra bright LEDS.
The only thing worse than LEDs on monitors is the cheap power supply attached to it. I had to sit in a room with ~30 monitors all blinking at their own intervals and every time one LED get's turned on, the power supply does a high pitch whistle. A cacophony of high pitch whistles. I was so close to burning the whole thing down.
It's up to the developer to make it usable, that doesn't take away from the fact that it's pretty amazing technology and people will find really cool stuff to do with it.
I just wouldn't blame the tech for bad implementations.
There's lots of prior art here, thinking of patents.
You might want to look at Atmel's maXTouch capacitive sensors. In particular what's going on with the noise floor, or signal to noise that's a relevant factor for resolution [1]. And a side band attack btw.
Infrared sensors are affected greatly by environmental infrared, so dual transmitter types and fast switch sampling and interferometric approaches.
You'll need to consider high sampling rates both in the time and frequency domains.
There is little "open source" research on hardware for novel user interfaces.
Most of this stuff is published at scientific conferences like CHI, UIST, ITS, TEI.
As "novelty" is quite important for publishing one's work at these conferences, there is little incentive for doing open research.
>Does anyone have any tips about getting involved with this area of work?
Do a PhD :) ralphman has it spot on. Even the non-academic companies who do this (Disney Research, Microsoft Research, etc.) will usually prefer hiring PhDs.
Doing a PhD in HCI is fun, challenging, will drive you insane, and is very rewarding! (I dropped out of mine after 2 years to do the startup thing but intend on going back :) )
These guys did a killer demo at NYTM. Very cool demo of turning a plant into an instrument (they played an orchid on stage). There was a good question about detection of differing touches of the doorknob, this could totally replace the key some day!
Some of that may depend on precision - how precise is the sensor? Can it pull a fingerprint, so it will basically do a fingerprint scan to authorize door unlocking?
I'm reminded of #66 on the Evil Overlord list - My security keypad will actually be a fingerprint scanner. Anyone who watches someone press a sequence of buttons or dusts the pad for fingerprints then subsequently tries to enter by repeating that sequence will trigger the alarm system.
The authors of Touché did a follow-up paper at UIST this year to study this exact question [1]. In brief, you can train a classifier on the impedance profile of specific users, but there are some significant limitations (impedance profiles naturally drift over time, and accuracy doesn't look so good with a lot of users).
A persons 'capacitive footprint' depends on skin moisture, clothing, anatomy, etc.
This allows Touché to distinguish certain users from each other in a lab setting.
As this approach uses only a single electrode (which is why it is so cool), the data it offers is quite limited compared to more complex sensor layouts.
In real life, such a sensor would need to work reliably even if I wear different shoes, have dirty hands, etc. Therefore, its false rejection rate needs to be very low. Which leads to a high false acceptance rate, i.e. several other people with similar capacitive footprints may open my door, too.
I might be going on a tangent here, but I can't help thinking there's something wrong with product names for the past few years. We're now naming things with incredibly common words, changing their very meaning into something else. Facebook, Touché, Bonjour, Spaces, Windows...
For some reason, it's creeping me out. I'm afraid to see one of those next big thing named Lundi, Ball, Tisch or Hora. It's like we're robbing our languages of their meaning, bit by bit, for commercial purpose.
With some exceptions, I don't think brand names are eclipsing the common definitions of the words, but just appending new definitions to them, which can easily be distinguished based on context - not unlike any other non-branded word with multiple definitions.
And we also gain new common words from brands that become generic, like Tabloid or Bikini.
And we also gain new common words from brands that become generic, like Tabloid or Bikini.
Bikini isn't a brand that became a generic word. It is a loan word from the native Marshall Islanders(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll), that was stolen for a brand then became generic. Which ironically proves his point.
It is. The fact that the brand name itself was derived from an existing proper noun doesn't change that fact.
And speaking of language abuse, I feel that some day the verb 'steal' will be synonymous with every possible offense. How does one steal an island name?
Always HCI (or Robotics) too. It's like, you never actually see what they're doing but it's always awesome (except for that large robot in some room on NS second floor right near the Wean bridge, but that might not be HCI). Also #proud :)
I think (?) the room on NS 2 you're thinking of is part of the Quality of Life Technology Center. <3 CMU and #proud. Can we all agree that the robot in the Gates 3 lounge area is somewhat creepy-looking though? His avatar looks like a cross between Julian Assange and Andy Warhol.
I really liked the demo controlling the music player; it struck me as the one I'd be most likely to actually see in the near future (The door with the different signs was neat, but requires a bit more hardware).
I'm curious where the sensors were placed for that one (I couldn't see them on the guy's arms) and if say, getting caught in the rain or a really dry day, would throw it on the fritz.
Potty training; put baby on the toilet before the diaper gets wet. Babies can be "trained" a remarkably young age, if the parents can predict urination.
"recognition rates approaching 100%" - how many times do we hear this? Basically it doesn't work, except for a set of carefully constructed circumstances.
Considering that autistics and empaths tend to have remarkably rich gestural languages for communicating a wide array of non-verbal units of meaning, or even propositions, and further that allocentric language may present scoped indexicals (and not to mention Ame. Sign Language), we may have an opportunity to develop interestingly rich gestural/touch APIs from the mechanics of neurologically rooted gestures which describe or underpin norms of highly complex, spontaneously emergent non-verbal communication.
For instance, would finger-flipping or self-stimulation be considered "noise" to such a system, or would the system be configurable or adaptive or "fuzzy" enough to make successful interpretations of various deviant forms of model human behaviors? (I'm wondering the intersection between these types of interfaces and the training (or, say, auto-designing) of them via neural networks.)
Whenever I want to feel excited about the future I just look at this video; seriously is really magic stuff. Changing your bathtub temperature with one gesture of your hand in the water; changing the channel by a simple gesture in the couch, the use-cases are virtually unlimited. Also if one day it becomes even more sensitive it could transform any object into a fingerprint detector!
What I tend to see in this demo is how to make a doorknob unintuitive, how to make music player functionality undiscoverable, how to accidentally lock yourself out, how to frustrate a user whose mental model of the sensor is incorrect.
I realize you have to approach new technology and interaction paradigms optimistically, but all I can think of is my own frustration when an ill-considered neato-feature is foisted on me when I least want it.
Like blue LEDs and touch sensitive buttons that lack a physical button (eg atmel q-touch).