Great Design, Great Features - Touch It!

I really like this. It looks so touchable which is handy as it has a touch screen interface. It uses a very thin touch panel and an active matrix organic LED (AMOLED) so the colours are better (16 million) and it is far more energy efficient managing to play music for 40 hours even with the 3.3″ display.

I don’t know if it will be iTunes compatible as many other new players a becoming, and probably contains it’s own unique take on music management software. iTunes is the most user friendly music management / mp3 player syncing software I have used so I hope that it would.

No idea on pricing or availability, the site is not all in English so who knows. Nice though.

Quick Arduino Use

Just found this and it uses the same Arduino technology that we had in iLab for the past project. Just goes to show what you can do. It’s all about the ideas. Must have more ideas.

Check it out here.

Give Me Buttons Any Day

iPhone. LG Viewty. Microsoft Surface, HP Touch Smart. All these touch screen phones are already on the market and there are many more on the way as every company follows suit wanting to have at least one touch screen product on their product line-up.

These are great technological achievements and showcase some of the best gadgets we have to offer…

BUT… They don’t have buttons! The traditional click button is one of the most fundamental, subtle, interactive experiences. The feeling you get when you press a button and hear the ‘click’ that it makes is fantastic and feeling the different textures of buttons is such a tactile experience that connects you to your gadget. You know the feeling of buttons that are familiar and you almost form a bond through that familiarity.

So now the world is moving away from this tradtitional technology towards an ironically named ‘touch‘ interface when the experience is a much more visual one. The visual experience is an obvious experience and with a new technology that many people are jumping on the band-waggon with. Few companies have considered the impact of a button-less design, some are experimenting with Haptic feedback. A vibration is felt when a virtual button is pressed, giving the user a physical cue confirming that they have actually pressed the button (a common problem with touch screen interfaces).

Now don’t get me wrong, touch screen interfaces do provide a great deal in place of traditional button interfaces such as the ability to instantly change the look of a virtual button or change the language. The best of which is to have contextual buttons based on the current screen you are viewing.

There needs to be a middle ground though. Something a few companies are experimenting with. The first that springs to mind is the iPod, a touch sensitive surface for scrolling and volume control but also a click button interface for making selections. Perfect. A few more examples examples are the LG KF600 which has a small contextual menu at the bottom of the main screen but has traditional buttons once the phone slides open. A happy compromise I think. Another example is the Optimus Maximus keyboard that has the traditional button layout but each button is a small OLED display capable of changing depending on what is required. So depending on what application you are using, contextual buttons appear. The best of both worlds is doable.

Touch screen works, but should not be exclusive. Users have other senses that need to be stimulated to create a more complete experience. Touch is a very important way of connecting with objects and I believe it should be used in harmony with the visual connection for the user to be able to have the best experience possible.

Masters of The Universe!

I have been offered a work placement at ITV Future Technologies in Camden. Great! I’m not writing about that now but I’m sure I will post about what I can while I’m working there. It has got me thinking about my future though. What do I want to do? Who do I want to do it for? Will it make me any money?

I am talking about employability of course, and not just getting a job after my BA Honours but ‘being all that I can be’. I am concerned that my BA may not be enough let me reach the heights that I want to in my career. Fate could deal me some great cards in terms of working for the right people and being in the right place at the right time but if there is something I can do now to give me the edge over my competitors then I owe it to my future to do it. I have learnt from my father’s experience when he reached a point from which he could not ascend because of a piece of paper (or lack thereof) regardless of experience and being the best in his field. I don’t want this to happen to me, so any qualifications I can get now, I won’t have to struggle without later and may open doors for me sooner than would have otherwise opened.

What this is all leading to is me doing a masters. To this end I have begun looking at MA and MSc courses starting September 2009 and thought I would share a few with you. I will NOT be doing a masters at Ravensbourne as I feel in order to get the best out of it, I need resources. Something that Ravensbourne’s head faculty seem reluctant to provide (for whatever reason) to the interaction department.

Here are a few of the courses I am considering:

MSc Multimedia Design and Virtual Reality Technologies

MA Interaction Design

MA Design for Interactive Media

MSc Human Computer Interaction with Ergonomics

MSc Digital Media

MSc Human-Computer Interaction

I am hoping to talk to someone at Ravensbourne soon about how to go about applying as even if I decide not to do a masters, there is no harm in applying. Oh and it’s going to cost about £5,000.

Visual Programming Spreading To The Web

MaxMSP is a great tool for creating interactive experiences using a method of programming similar to a flow diagram. You simply position the objects on the canvas and connect them in order to accomplish a goal. I used this program to create the Shoutbox application.

Recently I have discovered Yahoo Pipes which is a web based program allowing you to create a custom web 2.0 application using a library of existing APIs and filters from Google, Yahoo, Flickr and loads more. The surprising thing is that it also uses a visual programming style in order to simplify the experience and open it up to developers who are not as well versed in the various development languages.

I have only just starting using it but I will post whatever it is that I make. Check it out for yourselves at http://pipes.yahoo.com/

Fall On Your Face?

Many of you may be aware that this week the government in their ‘infinite wisdom’ have decided to trial a facial recognition system at Manchester & Stansted airports. Lets have a little look and see why this is a pointless endevour to “add another layer of security and not repace existing systems”.

A test on this scale is normally to work out any final bugs out and produce a final system that will then be rolled out across the rest of a network. There will be a few problems with this for our beloved UK gov.

To start with, facial recognition technology has NEVER been accurate, throwing up false-negatives and false-positives so this appears to be as much a test of the technology as it is of the security system and as far as I can tell it is based on existing technology. Concerns by the Biometrics Assurance Group (pdf) [show] that there is still work to do on both the facial recognition standards and the format in which facial images are stored.

This means the government is committing to a system upon which there are NO standards to adhere to, basically making this a very risky operation. Considering the biometric chip in passports may be incompatible with other systems, or at the very least when a standard is agreed UK residents with the chipped passports may end up having to get yet another passport. Normally standards are agreed before any large-scale testing goes ahead so this seems rather fool-hardy.

Now lets consider people who have gone before. There have been many tested applications of facial recognition and nearly all have been scrapped after only a few years in service as they proved impractical and inaccurate.

“Boston’s Logan Airport also ran two separate tests of facial recognition systems at its security checkpoints using volunteers. Over a three month period, the results were disappointing. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the system only had a 61.4 percent accuracy rate, leading airport officials to pursue other security options.”

If this is supposed to be another layer of security, to augment the already ludacris systems that are in place, then passengers will see no benefit at all. Did I mention that the whole process will be overlooked by securities staff who can step in at any time and take you to a real person to match your picture.

If all goes well and the system works then it will be truely remarkable and may indeed speed up entry through immigration. However, I feel that given the problems many people have with technology the so-called speed may be just an illusion, a target, similar to the fiasco at Heathrow Terminal 5. Not to mention the fact the system may fall flat on it’s face irrispective of whether people can use it. I predict an amalgation of both which will troublingly create some of the longest queues, the opposite of the desired effect.

Photos From Bahamas

I have been receiving so many compliments about my photography from the Bahamas that I posted on Facebook, and yet I haven’t plugged them here. So, I shall — here are may favorites.

As always click on the images to view the full set in Flickr. The sunset is my desktop wallpaper at the moment :D

Rio Surfaced

While I was in Vegas I had the opportunity to go to the Rio hotel and casino and to the bar with Microsoft Surface tables in it. At first I was really quite amazed at how seamlessly they worked with the decor and surroundings but as I explored them further there were a few usability issues with them.

So start with, nobody was really ‘using them’. I sat down with a few other people at one of the tables, they were trying to communicate with the table next to us. On the screen was a CCTV feed from all the other active tables. It seemed as though you had to drag and drop words from the sides to the screen and the message would send. This didn’t happen, to the point where we were running backwards and forwards between the tables defeating the point of the casual flirty comment between tables.

Another thing was that nobody was putting their drinks on the actual screen, even though cool effects happen when you do, nobody seemed to have noticed this. The problem was that there was a rim round the edge that was a different colour to the screen so people put their glasses on the edge as they didn’t want to break the screen.

I’m sure there were many more features that these tables have (like ordering drinks and playing games etc) but after the initial frustration with the technology nobody seemed interested in exploring further. The average usage time from what I observed was less than 10 minutes.

The more you drink, the more you want it to work but the less it does.

All in all, it was a gimmick for the bar and for Microsoft.

It’s A Trap!

I love Robot Chicken. It’s official.

I knew Robot Chicken was made by the people that do Family Guy, and I knew that it was stop motion but for some reason I had never watched any of it until my holiday when I put two seasons of it on my iPod.

I think it is definitely on par with Family Guy, maybe even edged it a bit becuase it was new and unexpected. I laughed so very hard at the Star Wars special they did, not about the actual Star Wars storylines, more about the storylines around the outer edge of Star Wars, things that could be infurred as true from the films.

Below is one of the funniest things I have seen in a while. I love Star Wars and I love comedy, you have to have seen Star Wars a few times to understand the comedy in this. So I hope you have.

Specially Selected for Secondary Screening

I have just returned from a very nice two week holiday in the Bahamas with my parents and sister but if you think I am going to write about how the holiday was as my first post then you are sorely mistaken. That will come later.

The first post is about how thoroughly targeted I felt on the journey, how my privacy was invaded at every opportunity and how nobody seemed to want to listen to reason - nobody with any authority anyway.

To get to the Bahamas you have a few choices to make as there is not yet a direct flight to the island of Exuma where we stayed. Do you go to Nassau then on to Exuma or do you go through Miami then on to Exuma? The only difference is that going though Miami is much cheaper but I advise caution if you are a white, British family of four.

The first leg of the journey started at Heathrow which was fairly quick I suppose but for some reason there were four or five people telling us on the way to the security checkpoint that we were not allowed liquids over 100ml, fair enough but after the third person reels of a list of things that could be over 100ml (how stupid am I?) it got quite tedious. By number five I was already making jokes about their job descriptions and CVs. Passport control and signing up for IRIS recognition (more about that in another post) was fast and relatively stress free.

Once in Miami International however, things took a dramatic turn for the worse. The Queue to get into the country was long… the queue to even get into that queue streched right back to an escelator making for some difficult negotiation of luggage and bodies to avoid being dragged back down on the underside. After an hour or so we finally got to immigration where we were interigated (Are you a terrorist? Are you involved in espionage? Real head scratchers…) and were forced to give our fingerprints. You either do it or you don’t come in… I asked.

Now we get to the crux of my complaint. Getting out of America is fatastically difficult and I must say absolutely retarded. To start you have to swipe your passport to get your tickets printed, fine, but if it doesn’t scan and you enter it manually then you have to seek out an attendant type person to ‘approve’ you. Even the one standing right next to us needed plenty of encouragement to even come near us. Then when you have your ticket you have to go to ‘baggage drop’. I must point out this is the same in the UK with Virgin and some other airlines. So we now have to join another queue to drop our bags off, which we do and show our tickets and passports and are asked again if we are terrorist etc. Then for some reason we have to take our bags away, yes that is right, we queued to drop our bags off only told we have to take them back after they’re weighed. This caused no end of confusion and delays for everyone as you have to negotiate the queue back the way you came… to drop your bags at a ’special’ TSA screening booth.

TSA is the unit that is responsible for the searching of people and bags for things that might be a hazzard, like hand creame, and do so with an obvious lust for power. After being motioned to another queue after dropping our bags of at the bag drop, bag drop… we were then told we had ‘randomly’ been selected for secondary screening or SSSS as it was printed on our tickets. The guy who told us about this was very shocked to see us in this queue as we were a family of four white, British, middle-class holiday go-ers. After being stuck in this queue for half an hour we saw where it went… a ’special’ area for ’specially selected’ people of interest. Oh and so show how random it was, there were no Americans in this queue, no Muslims, no Arabs, no Turbans or Burkhas of any kind. Now I’m not suggesting that these people are going to be dangerous but given the way america views the world, I was very surprised. The people in this section were not organised and didn’t care. My family was split up, sent around in circles, asked to point out our luggage that we couldn’t see, and treated pretty poorly. Just like everyone else in this large supposedly random queue. We went through an explosive residue detector, a metal detector and had our shoes and bags scanned… My dad and my sister were put in a special glass ‘pen’ with a locked door and then asked to point to their bags, then searched one by one, frisked, wanded and made to walk through another series of metal detectors. After which they then had to find their shoes and bags (which contained the valuables they had to remove) in a sea of everyone elses. My dad made a very good point that this area would be an ideal target for a suicide bomber as there was so much confusion and so many people it would be easy and result in serious casualties. My mum was wearing a bracelet that went off in every metal detector and every time she was asked to take it off and every time she replied with “I can’t because the clasp screws on” and every time she was met with a puzzled look and asked to take all her other jewellery off (which doesn’t make the machine bleep) and put it in her bag. Then her bag was thrown into the sea of other bags and all she could do was hope that no one saw her put all her gold in it. Then she was searched but of course it had to be by a woman so for the next ten minutes all you could here was “female assist” which went without reply.

It was at this point I read the signs saying “verbal or physical threats or abuse of TSA staff is a breach of federeal law” or words to that effect. It was all I could do to restrain myself from screaming at them “do you actually have any common sense you complete retard!”. So the signs in fact fuelled this sensation.

After all of that was over one guy said “thanks for your patience” and I actually laughed at him saying “it’s not like I had a choice”… he wasn’t happy, I’m surprised he didn’t take me into a back room and perform another kind of search… cough cough.

Then our plane was delayed, delayed again, delayed again then cancelled. Then it took an hour to speak to someone who actually cared and sent us to Fort Lauderdale to get another flight leaving fairly soon.

When we go there and got our tickets you can guess what they said… ‘SSSS’ so we went through the whole process again, albeit much faster as it was a smaller airport, it was the same story with my mum and her bracelet. My comments about organisation and such were not appreciated by the guy searching my bag and pulling out the bottle of water I’d bought after the screening in Miami, not having enough time to think about it before rucshing accross the city to another airport. When he finished he said something about the key to organisation being communication… it made little sense and had little relevance to the situation at hand but he had thought about it for several minutes so he must have felt I needed to hear it. He also wouldn’t let my dad try and find his passport until he had finished looking through his bag.

When we actually went to board the plane, there was another TSA desk that was picking people out of the line and guess what, my sister (the evil and sisnister looking girl that she is) was ’selected’ and given another rigourous search.

Is the UK not worried about terrorism as much as the US? Are we less of a target? Or is it simply that we seem to be much more pragmatic about the whole process? All I know is that I hope I never go to Miami Interational in a hurry, or maybe I should wear a turban if I do?

In no way do I want this to me misconstrood as belittlement of terrorism of the efforts of people trying to prevent it… but this expericence felt like targeted victimisation. Maybe it was articles like that that got us in the special selection in the first place. I think my name has just moved up a few places in the rankings.

Next time, my fun with IRIS recognition.