Lesson 2.1

• Human Computer Interaction (HCI) helps us to understand why some software products are good and other software is bad. But sadly, it is not a guaranteed formula for creating a successful product.
• “Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest” - Isaac Asimov
• Virtual reality (VR) The term virtual reality originally applied only to full immersion VR, in which simulated world is projected onto all walls of a room (CAVE – a recursive acronym for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), or via a head-mounted display (HMD) which uses motion-tracking to change the view as you turn your head.
• Augmented reality (AR) systems overlay digital information onto the real world, either using partially-transparent head mounted displays, or by taking a video feed of an actual scene, and compositing it with computer generated elements.
• Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) use physical objects to control the computer, most often a collection of objects arranged on a tabletop to act as ‘physical icons’. An immediate problem is that physical objects don’t change their visible state very easily.
• Visual Representation

  • Typography and text
  • Maps and graphs
  • Schematic drawings
  • Pictures
  • Icons and symbols
• 1. Typography and text

  • For many years, computer displays resembled paper documents. This does not mean that they were simplistic or unreasonably constrained. On the contrary, most aspects of modern industrial society have been successfully achieved using the representational conventions of paper, so those conventions seem to be powerful ones.
• 2. Maps and graphs

  • Basic diagrammatic conventions rely on quantitative correspondence between a direction on the surface and a continuous quantity such as time or distance. These should follow established conventions of maps and graphs.
• 3. Schematic Drawings

  • Engineering drawing conventions allow schematic views of connected components to be shown in relative scale, and with text annotations labelling the parts. White space in the representation plane can be used to help the reader distinguish elements from each other rather than directly representing physical space.
• 4. Pictures

  • Pictorial representations, including line drawings, paintings, perspective renderings and photographs rely on shared interpretive conventions for their meaning. It is naïve to treat screen representations as though they were simulations of experience in the physical world.
• 5. Icons and symbols

  • The design of simple and memorable visual symbols is a sophisticated graphic design skill. Following established conventions is the easiest option, but new symbols must be designed with an awareness of what sort of correspondence is intended - pictorial, symbolic, metonymic (e.g. a key to represent locking), bizarrely mnemonic, but probably not monolingual puns.
• Advance user interface techniques

  • Virtual reality (AR)
  • Augmented reality (AU)
  • Tangible user interface (TUI)