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.