Information Visualization

Introduction
Information visualization, means representation of large-scale non-numerical information visually. Often regarded as an interdisciplinary study subject, it is close related to human-computer interaction, computer science, graphics, visual design, psychology and business methods.

Information Visualization: Intention
The intention of information visualization is "To allow users to see, explore and understand large amounts of information at once." This is possible because humans tend to interpret graphical information faster and the retention is longer. This could be seen from the usage of the famous mind-map, which proved to help better memorize and interpret information.

Information Visualization: More Organized Data Display  

Representation of large amount of information is hard, and interpretation of such information is even harder. However, with the help of visualization, certain type of data, such as hierarchical data, could be visualized effectively to give an organized view. The image below is a botanical representation of Unix home-directory, which is often regarded as "hard to interpret".

Information Visualization: Simplified Decision-making

Complex information spaces often hinder, rather than help, the decision-making process. Visualization of information, including transformations the data undergoes within the information system, can provide the mental image often needed to make effective decisions.
For example, sometimes it is important for a website maintainer to know where the site's visitors come from so that the maintainer could better the site's service by providing local mirrors to those places where majority of the visitors come from. However, there could be millions of visits from all over the world and it becomes difficult to make correct decisions based on raw data. In such situations, information visualization becomes handy. Application like Google Analytics could provide visualization of such information, as shown in the image below. This makes interpretation a lot easier. In this case, the website maintainer can at once decide that the mirror should be physically located somewhere in the southern east part of the country.

Information Visualization: Challenges
Information visualization faces several significant challenges:
1. Visualized information could be cognitively too hard to understand. This is a serious problem that never seem to go away. Consider the hedgehog representation used for web mining, it is very difficult for an non-expert to understand the graph.

2. Integration with data sources is difficult: Most of the time it requires a lot of effort to transform a dataset to a format that visualization tools can understand. And in many cases the visualized information is not worth the effort because it is still too difficult to understand.

Conclusion

Information visualization makes use of human's traits of fast cognition of graphical data, to improve interpretation of large-scaled non-numerical data. This technique is helpful in many cases, especially when non-accuate decision-making is needed. Information in many cases is difficult to visualize due to constraints in information format and nature. However, with advancements in computer technologies, these difficulties may be overcome and information visualization could make HCI more effective.

User Experience, Sketch-based application & Brain-computer Interface

Introduction
There are two guest lectures in Week 11, with topics on sketch-based applications and brain-computer-based application respectively. However, they both emphasis user experience, the determinant of nowadays applications.

The age of features is gone.
When computers were initially invented, people have been thinking about accomplishing all kinds of tasks with them. Now, after 60 years of evolution, computer application development has reached a stage whereby features are overflowing. At the same time, applications are getting more and more difficult to use when their complexity grows as a result of feature overflow. Many applications with a great feature set are no longer popular, due to excessive features and complexity, such as GNU Emacs.

The age of experience is coming.
Previously used top-down model, with features decided by managers and nobody cares about the actual users, will no longer work. Instead, it is far more important to allow user to do things that they used to do better and faster, or in more places.
User experience is the key in computer application development, and brings huge competitive advantage. Think about the sucess of the iPhone, which does not really have more functionalities that other smart phones. It is the seamless user experience that makes a difference.

Sketch-based application
Hundreds of drawing applications are available with all kinds of features. As a drawing application developer, how to excel in such a competitive environment? User experience is the key. T.E.D.D.Y is an application that allows creation of 3D image out of 2D drawings. The application is very easy to use, with intuitive stylus gestures for different functions.

SandCanvas, is a multi-touch sand animation application developed by a group of NUS alumni. The greatest feature is that the application could capture gestures performed by different parts of the hand. It gives users a real-world sand drawing experience. Due to its creativity and functionality, it won Best Design at CHI 2011.

Interestingly, the most intuitive way to design an user interface (which is the deciding factor of user experience) is through sketching. Thus, advancements in more user friendly sketching applications could stimulate the creation of better user interfaces and thus formation of better use experience.

Brain-computer interface: Understanding your mind

As was mentioned, user experience is the deciding factor of whether an application could success. However, how do one actually measure user experience? After all, it is not something that is tangible and easily measurable.

With advancements in Brain-computer interface, however, it becomes possible to measure a user's experience using an application. Brain-computer interface allows communication between brain and an external device, such as a Neurosky headset.

A device like Neurosky headset makes use of EEG (Electroencephalography) to record brain's electrical activity. The recorded information could be used to determine the user's real-time mind activity status: whether the user's brain is excited or unexcited, for example.

We could record down a user's brain activity while he/she is helping us testing an application prototype. Then we could analyze the brain activity record to decide which parts of the prototype are well designed (which excites the user, for instance) and which are not. This is a promising field and could potentially help improving user experience study to a new height.

It is interesting to note that, brain-computer interface itself could be a user-friendly interface and potentially create great user experience. Hardware companies like OCZ has already released BCI gadgets that could be used in gaming.

Conclusion

With continuous computer software development for over half a century, we are in an era whereby features are overflowing. Current trend in computer application development has a strong emphasis on user experience. With recognition of the importance of user experience, and with the help of well-designed software and new technologies such as brain-computer interfaces, we will see a great leap of computer application user experience in the near future.

Kinect and Virtual Reality

Introduction

Virtual reality(VR), refers to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in real, as well as in imaginary world. It could be applied to a wide range of applications, from industrial to educational, from entertainment to defense. Nowadays, with advancements in computer technologies, virtual reality is becoming more important and useful.

I. Technologies related to Virtual Reality

For a normal person, information provided by his/her vision occupies 85-90 percent of total information he/she acquired. Thus the most important part of VR is vision. VR normally requires high quality 3D vision, which could be achieved in several ways:

1. Head-mounted displays: perhaps it is the mostly used solution to 3D vision creation. To create 3D vision, there is a display optic in front of each eye. This solution could give acceptable immersion experience and the biggest advantages are its portability and relatively low cost (comparing with other solutions listed below.

1. Holography: Literately, holography refers to creation of the 3D image of an object so that it appears the real object is present. This is also a frequently used technique in creating virtual reality.

1. Multi-sided Immersive Environment: Such a system usually consists of a physical environment (a room with 4 walls, ceiling and floor, for example) and a set of instruments to provide vision (high definition projectors, for example). Together with 3D surround-sound, this solutions in general gives the best VR experience in terms of immersion. The disadvantages are mainly the high cost as well as poor portability.

In reality, we can interact with the surrounding environment. Thus in VR, interaction is also an important part. Previously, interaction in VR environment was normally through certain pointing device (such as a 3D mouse). Recently, with advancements in motion detection technology such as Microsoft Kinect, interaction in VR could be more natural and intuitive, allowing for better immersion.

II. VR used in training

One of the application of VR is industrial and military training. In these trainings, there are challenges associated, as listed below:

• Engagement and motivation
• Retention improvement
• Cost saving
• Timeline acceleration
• Increasing hands-on experience 

Through traditional training, it is hard to resolve these challenges all together. For example, it is difficult to achieve both cost saving and "Increasing hands-on experience" at the same time for emergency situation handling for a offshore oil plant. While these problems could be solved if VR is used for training. This is why VR is becoming more and more important in training.

(image of VR training)

III. Criteria for VR assessment

During the guest lecture about VR and Interactive 3D solution, the speaker mentioned 3 criteria for assessing an VR implement which are:

• Realism: How realistic the environment is, including vision, sound and other sensations.
• Interaction: How the user interacts with the environment; how intuitive and effective the interaction is.
• Immersion: how well the user immerses into the environment, this largely depends on the above two criteria.

IV. Vision of VR

In the coming future, the trend of VR application is emphasis on real-time, collaborative environment. The environment simulated should be able to respond to the user's interaction in real time; the environment should allow different users to collaborate with each other, for instance, 2 users in different physical locations could virtually play poker in one virtual room, in which they could see "each other".

Conclusion

Virtual reality is an increasingly popular and important field in computer technology research and engineering, for its ever-more importance in the field of entertainment, industry and militia. The future trend of VR is fully-immersive, real-time, collaborative virtual environments. We have reasons to believe that VR is going to change our everyday life int he near future.

Function & Fashion

Introduction
Debating about function and fashion has never ceased. To a certain extent, it seems that these two concepts are mutually exclusive. But is it really so? This blog will talk about the relation between them.

1. Function and Fashion Are Not Mutually Exclusive
An expert LaTeX user may think that LaTeX is a lot better than a GUI Word Processor System such as Microsoft Word because it is more powerful and MS Word's more fancy GUI is just useless.

While it is indeed true that LaTeX could produce documents of better quality (in a sense that it is more "functional"), it is also a lot more difficult to learn and consumes more time in producing simpler documents. MS Word on the other hand, might not be able to produce as beautiful documents as LaTeX, but its "useless" GUI in nerds' mind could be a life-saver for novice computer users for its intuitiveness and WYSIWYG feature.
Thus we could see that fashion and function are not mutually exclusive, and they are even exchangeable sometimes.
For a more detailed comparison between MS Word and LaTeX, click here.


2. Fashion Could Become Function
A good example to illustrate this point is "Dock" in Macintosh OS. It is fashionable because it has got cute icons with magnification effects. At the same time this "fashion" also make it crystal clear for the user to see what tasks are running in the system; furthermore, Dock allows easy access to resources on the system in an intuitive way. In this sense, Dock with cool effects is functional as well.

3. Fashion Could Destroy Function
If not applied properly, fashion could destroy function. Think about the iPhone, which is considered as one of the most fashionable and creative gadgets ever invented. But let's see what if its fashion is improperly used. The image below is a screenshot of an iPhone application called "Proposal". What it does is to display "Will you marry me" on the screen. The designer of this application thinks that iPhone users will use it to propose to their girl friends. But come on, only someone who wants a broken iPhone and a broken relationship would use it!

4. Function & Fashion: Understand the Purpose
Design metrics for different systems could be entirely different. For systems that are frequently used for production purpose, efficiency is the paramount and fascinating UI is not necessary. While for more casual systems that users would not use frequently (like many websites), the UI design is of more importance because it has to be appealing to the user. The image below is a UI comparison of a stock trading system and the famous Apple website. Notice the sharp distinction between the styles and feelings, which illustrates the importance to use different design metrics for systems with different purposes.

5. Non-anthropomorphic Design
Many people think it fashionable and desirable if a computer could "talk"and "think" like human beings. While it may seem appealing, currently it is still a widely-accepted paradigm that non-anthropomorphic design is a better approach, for the following reasons:

• Although anthropomorphic design may appeal to some users, it will produce anxiety for others.

• Suggestion that computers can think gives users an erroneous model as to how they work.

6. Siri May Change the Paradigm

Released together with iPhone 4S, Siri is a high precision voice recognition system that could be used for many tasks such as sending text messages, setting reminders and searching for contents. If it indeed proves to be as powerful as Apple claims, it might change the paradigm that anthropomorphic design is not a sensible approach.

Conclusion

Function and Fashion are not mutually exclusive at all. On the other hand, in many cases it is hard to distinguish one from the other. As a designer, it is of vital importance to identify the nature of the system to be designed and apply design metrics accordingly. Like computer hardware, HCI design guidelines and trends are also constantly evolving. Many paradigms like non-anthropomorphic design could be shifted as technology advances and people's mind evolves.

Robotic Interfaces

Introduction:
Robotic interface, simply put, is a gateway between a person and a robotic product. These interfaces could be as simple as an automated voice system over telephones to as sophisticated as an actual human-like robot.

Humanoid Interfaces
An entertainment robot like Sony Giro provides various interfaces for HCI, such as voice, tactile sensation and vision. This allows it to interact with human in a natural way (for example, a person might "order" Qrio to salute by voice). The follow video about Qrio talking with kids demonstrates its highly humanoid interface:

Importance of Reliable Robotic Interface Design
When it comes to industrial and military applications, pleasure becomes less of an importance. In these systems, safety, reliability and efficiency become the paramount. Robotic interface designers have to be extremely cautious. The famous silicon valley CX30 "killer robot" case shows the importance of correct design of robotic interfaces.

Robotic Interfaces Used in Daily Life
Robotic devices have been used to help severely disabled personals. Physicist Stephen Hawking has been able to move and speak after developing and being almost completely paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), with the help of his specially designed wheelchair, which is essentially a robot.

Stephen Hawking now relied on his cheek to control the wheelchair and the voice synthesizer mounted, which turned out inefficient. During a TED conference talk, it took him 7 minutes to answer a question.

A Possible Future of Robotic Interfaces
One of the research direction for robotic interfaces is brain-robotic interfaces, which aims at interaction with robotic products directly by human brain waves. This allows intuitive interaction and manipulation of robotic products. Although still far off, such technology may become reality someday and completely change our everyday life.

Conclusion
Robotic interfaces, seemingly remote, is already part of our life. Widely used in industrial, commercial and medical applications, it slows changes the way we live and perceive the world. The future of robotic interfaces, will focus on natural (humanoid) and intuitive interaction, to be realized through lower-level human functions such as voice, gesture and even brain waves.

References:

Robotic Interface, http://www2.mse.vt.edu/inamm/RoboticInterface/tabid/864/Default.aspx
Stephen Hawking, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking
The Future of User Interfaces, http://sixrevisions.com/user-interface/the-future-of-user-interfaces/
The 'Killer Robot' Interface, Horace Gritty, http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/risks/safety/killer_robot/killer_news5.html

Team 18 Project Proposal

Introduction:
There are various different kinds of events in NUS everyday, such as career talk, student events. To organize such events, organizers usually need to:

• select a date and book the venue
• design the event flow
• send invitation email to potential participants.
• gather response from targeted participant group

Usually organizers do not use external systems that integrates these functions together because they are complicated to use and usually not free. Thus they have to resort to different systems to complete these steps. It is easy to see that this is a tedious process.

The purpose of our project is to design a web-based application to ease the flow of event organization in NUS, from date, venue selection to event registration. With the help of our application, the event organizer  will be able to arrange an event simply by clicking his mouse in front of a computer.


Literature Review:
There are several similar event management applications that have already be implemented. It is pretty sure that an NUS event can be organized using those applications. However,there are mainly two drawbacks in those applications.Firstly, most of such applications have a very complex user interface. The picture below is a screen snapshot of an event application.

Although reasonably well designed, there are unnecessary options which makes users tired of reading. Our goal is to make the application specific for events in NUS; to remove unnecessary functions and excessive complexities so as to help users achieve higher efficiency.


Functionalities with sketches of interface:
Venue & Date selection and Booking:

Overall, we are going provide users four functions: Venue & Date selection and booking, program design, budget management and invitation management. The four steps are listed on the left side of all our interfaces so that the users will directly know that what is the flow of our application and users will be able to go to any step by clicking on these four button, which will give users maximum freedom.
The first function we provide is Venue & Date selection and booking. The venue is grouped by faculties. This is a reasonable way of grouping since different kinds of activities may taken places in different faculty. For example, industries talks are most like to be taken in Engineering faculty, science report may be taken place in science faculty. Once the users has chosen the venue. The information of the venue will be displayed such as the location, capacity and facility.
The date selection is implemented as a calendar. Users can make their decision simply by clicking on the day in calendar. Once he selects the date, available time slots of the day will be displayed.
Program Design:

The second function we provide is program design. Some programs, such as lunch, closing speech, etc., are by default displayed in the "table". Users can drag and drop those programs into the event's timetable on the right side. Of course, user can add more activities into the "table" by clicking the plus symbol on the top up corner of the "table".
Budget Management:

The third function we provide is budget management.  Users can enter description of an item (including item name and cost) and add it to the expenses table on the right side. The all the expenses are summarized in the expenses table. And user can generate a budget report using our application (not shown on the sketch above).
Invitation Management:

The last function we provide is invitation management. Sending invitation email is integrated into our application. If user need to get RSVP from potential participants, he can click Request RSVP button. User can use our application to design RSVP form as well.

User can add different fields they need into the RSVP form and a preview of the RSVP form will be displayed on the right side of the screen.

If potential participants reply, our application will be notified. Then the organizer may view RSVP statistics using our application. Moreover, users can export the statistics to excel.

Application on NUS officer side:

Once an application has been made, our system will generate an email to NUS officer side. Then, the officer can log in to our system as a facilitator to accept or decline the application. Furthermore, there will be specific interface in our application for facilitators to view/edit bookings of facilities under his/her management.

Assumptions:

NUS will to provide us with an API to access NUS database, such as NUS email and venue availability database.
Strength of each team member:
Christine Lisun: Design interface
Xu Yecheng: Programming ability.
Xiang Yongzhou:Good team work ability.
Huang Cheng::Programming ability.
Our strength lay in different fields. We could help each other in this project and make it a successful application.

Interaction in wayFinding applications

Introduction
In this blog post, we are going to discuss about different kinds of interactions in wayFinding applications.


1. Overview
The term interaction comes from Human-Computer interaction. Instead of defining what is interaction, we need to note that the important thing is that the user is interacting with the computer in order to accomplish something(http://mysite.verizon.net/resnx4g7/PCD/WhatIsInteractionDesign.html).

In wayFinding application, user's goal is to reach his/her destination. Currently, there are significant number of wayFinding applications available to us. For example, GoogleMap, AR Navi NUS, and Wikitude Drive (Augmented Reality). We will try to assess each of these wayFinding applications in terms of user interaction.

2. Google maps
The most widely used wayFinding application over the internet and mobile devices would be the Google Maps. The interface of Google Maps is simple and user friendly. Users can view the map of the whole city, and learn the exact location of themselves in the city. Simply key in the start point and end point you want, the Google Maps would highlight a suggested route for you. Furthermore, Google Maps can also show you nearby restaurants and gas stations which can be very convenient to us.

2. AR Navi NUS
AR Navi NUS is a new indoor wayFinding application in NUS which implements Augmented Reality (AR) technology to give a better user interface. It gives us a 3D image of NUS buildings so that users can locate their destination within the buildings easily. However this technology is not mature yet, there is a need for the users to correct their current locations with markers spread all over the campus.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxyT7Bu_KvE

3. Wikitude Drive (AR)
Wikitude Drive is a new wayFinding application for drivers and pedestrians. In terms of its interaction with users, Wikitude offers the most natural interaction. Users do not have to read a map, just follow the line. Users never have to take their eyes off the road so it is safer. Lastly, it is simply more fun and cool! It can also change to pedestrian mode and the interface is also the same as in driving mode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-0cuqeUvCQ


4. Future wayFinding Applications
In the future, when AR technology becomes more mature, optical see-through display can be used in one-for-all wayFinding application. User simply wear the optical device and see the real world overlaid with virtual objects directing them to their destination. With speech recognition, user can simply voice out where they want to go and the device will show the direction directly on top of user vision of real world. In our opinion it would be the most natural way to interact with user for navigation.

optical see-through display
 http://www.se.rit.edu/~jrv/research/ar/introduction.html

Conclusion
As we have discussed above, we can see different types of wayFinding applications, such as indoor, outdoor, driving, walking wayFinding applications. Each of them offers different user interactions and is suitable for a specific situation. There has not been a one-for-all wayFinding application up till now.  In the future, however, with advancements in HCI such as AR technology and voice recognition, wayFinding will be more natural, convenient and accurate.