Creating User Interfaces

1
Creating User Interfaces

• Ideas and Trends.
• Work session
• Homework Be prepared to present VoiceXML
  project. Post questions for final.

2
Telepresence

• Variety of problem domains
• Surgery
• Games
• Conferences
• Video conference
• Shared classroom Blackboard
• Monitoring activity
• Vision system in computer classroom?
• Web cams
• Monitoring without interaction (other than camera
  control)
• Social networking sites
• Second Life

3
Telepresence features

• Avatars
• real looking whole bodies
• Holographic projection?
• Video of varying quality?
• speaker needs some feedback report on talk to
  LA HTML5 users' group.
• hands

4
Study related to control for telepresence

• The hand is more easily fooled than the
  eye users are more sensitive to visual
  interpenetration than to visual-proprioceptive
  discrepancyBurns E., Razzaque S., Panter A.,
  Whitton M., McCallus M., Frederick P J.
   Presence Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
  15(1) 1-15, 2006.
• Measured responses of subjects playing a game by
  controlling avatars hand
• Primed and not primed
• Calibrated individual response

5
Haptic devices

• Relating to sense of touch
• Also strain, heaviness, etc. NOTE for this
  especially, signal may be amplified or
  transformed for better performance
• Devices providing users with feedback to help
  perform task
• Blind
• Missing limbs
• Games
• Surgeons
• ?

6
Why?

• Some applications reminds me of phone companies
  focus on video phone at expense of work on data
  communications
• Skepticism does not apply to haptic devices,
  other.
• We do have video phone now with Skype, Google!
• Discussion?

7
Idea way to view progress

• Technology driven
• solution searching for problem
• What is killer ap?
• Problem driven
• problem searching for solution
• Interaction of two
• technology to problem to re-direction of
  technology

8
Trends

• Voice Speech Recognition
• general unrestricted, still coming?
• dictation systems in use
• dictation systems for text messages
• How is this different from dictating (formal)
  letters, articles?
• directed speech (VoiceXML) substantial use
• phone help desks, 800 information, pharmacy
• car directions
• factory
• Case of actual problems re-directing research on
  technology

9
Trends

• Immersion / ubiquity (natural speech recognition
  access to files databases)
• general be anywhere (somewhere), ask question
  and get answer synthesizing information from
  anywhere including own computer files
• search (google competitors)
• keywords only. Access to growing number of files
  (e.g., PowerPoint charts)
• Dark web
• Semantic Web still in development
• new so-called semantic tags in HTML5 describe
  content

10
Keywords

• enough in certain cases
• search (search aggregated history)
• google still ahead of others
• Not yet integrated with individual history, at
  least I don't think so
• Ask artist Jacques Lipchitz

11
Natural language or not

• false assumption best interface is people
  talking to computers
• Abdominal study
• Technical questions and technical answers
• PI said please don't make me use English

12
Games

• Puzzles
• new ideas (hexic not quite next tetris)
• Action
• improved plots
• improved integration 3D modeling and video
  requires improved performance
• Peer to peer games
• improved networking
• ideas and marketing
• Trend to large communities playing game
• ??

13
Meta trend

• User-centered design
• consumer rebellion against products
• buggy released too soon?
• overly complex (fat)
• My complaint want the old Paint Shop Pro back
  simple, cheap
• Open Source
• distributed developmentMaybe not diverse enough

14
Meta trend

• Outsourcing / off-shoring
• Technical work done by remote group using fixed
  specifications
• Initial motivation costs, eventually skills
• My theory IT (information technology
  professionals) did a poor job relating to actual
  users rest of the company so that proximity was
  not valued.

15
Meta trend

• Evaluation of technology
• Is it good enough to provide substantial value
  even if not close to perfect / ideal?
• Phone directed speech / speech synthesis
• Many, many special cases in which the limited
• directed dialogs are good enough
• Language translation
• Google/yahoo/etc. directions/locations

16
Meta trend / issues

• Concerns with
• Viruses
• Spam
• Unwanted cell phone messages audio or text
• Privacy (identity theft, insider crime). Is this
  an issue for most users?
• Problem in search of technology solutions

17
Meta trend

• Globalization issues
• ICANN remain with US Dept. of Commerce?
• Languages
• Localization

18
Meta trend

• Consumers accepting
• Packaged interactions, e.g., Facebook
• Constrained interactions, e.g., Twitter
• ???

19
Web services

• Applications put together using building blocks
• Example google maps API
• Example (maybe) paypal service
• XML frequently used as format for interface
• Other?

20
By the way

• XML versus Database
• For applications with large amounts of data, need
  to go to
• Regular commercial databases
• For really large amounts of data, need special
  techniques, including
• Linked lists
• Hash tables
• Other
• COMMERCIAL consider taking Data Structures

21
Capability versus Productivity

• Capability
• can it be done
• Productivity
• do it better, faster, cheaper
• Example XML, etc. can be used to produce
  interfaces for multiple platforms from same
  content in more efficient, less error-prone way.

22
Grab bag

• Technology wireless plus gps (add more
  functionality to cell phone/PDA)
• Technology touch, gesture, eye-movement
• Problem identification
• individual voice, non-invasive DNA, etc.
• in mass image recognition issues of speed and
  accuracy
• Problem understanding of complex data
  visualization techniques for combining data
  sources

23
Homework

• Post constructive comments on other proposals.
• Complete VoiceXML project.
• Test with at least 2 people not in the class.
• Prepare 1-pager
• Present application (describe, show significant
  coding, demonstrate) and
• Present results from testing