Any ideas on how I can design and build a Charisma Augmentation Device…? Learn about the science of charisma.

Handy handy – a useful new and free visualisation tool called Parallel Sets has just been released.

An arty digital analog clock designed by Humans Since 1982 – Clock Clock: The Analog Digital Clock (thanks Baz).

See how the world looks to a baby’s eyes.

What is our psychology of time? Read The future is nonlinear on Mind Hacks to learn more.

Drool drool love the visual style in the My Drive Thru music video.

Air Ape art.

Learn about traffic waves. You’ll never be bored sitting in traffic again. (found at Population of One)

May be worth a read Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity

Read about electronic chips implanted in the eye for restoring sight – Seeing the light.

We can simulate you. Out Of The Blue is an engaging article about whether a supercomputer can be used to simulate a biologically accurate brain. Sounds like they’re getting real results.

Nanoscale pretty.

We can model you and you and you and everyone. Use Geosimulation to model urban panic. Pruned (a neat blog) has a good writeup on Paul Torrens related research.

Have you ever gotten into one of those silly arguments about the colour of something? You know where you’re sure that a t-shirt is red, while your friend is 100% sure its redish yellow. Frustrating isn’t it.

Strange as it is, both of you can be utterly right.

You both “see” a slightly different colour because of individual differences in physiology. The receptors in eyes that help convert light into colour often have slightly different sensitivities between people. For most people the differences are so slight they’re not usually noticed, but people with colour blindness experience a world where colours appear very different. Go here for details about the Ishihara colour plate image, which is used in testing whether people are colour blind.

There are thought to be women who are the opposite of colour blind, they are tetrachromats who are able to see more colours than most people (who are usually trichromats). Damn Interesting has a good introductory article about tetrachromats A Life More Colorful, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a good article with a little more science background, Some women may see 100 million colors, thanks to their genes.

Previously I’ve touched upon individual differences in genetics for Personalised Medicine and the Psychology of Individual Differences.

There are many other kinds of subtle physiological differences, such as variations in taste receptors and densities on the human tongue. Here’s an introductory article about taste blindness.

Individual differences in physiology can be measured. These measures can be used to shape the design of objects. For example measures of your taste receptors could be used to automatically adapt a collection of cooking recipes to enhance the flavour for your tongue. Or TVs could have inbuilt smarts that adapt football game colours so a person with red-green colour blindness can more easily see their favourite football team. No more struggling to see a team wearing a red outfit running around on a green pitch, or a red snooker ball on a green table.

If the above is to become possible then self-mallable / re-shapable objects that adapt to the individual physiology of users need:
1) measures of user physiology
2) predictive models of the impact due to physiological differences, i.e. if an object is adapting to a user how does it know an adaption has a positive or negative effect?

This builds on implications from When Toothbrushes Mate: Form & Function DNA. Malleable objects and artifacts need to be:
1) self-describing
2) user describing (predicting the impact on user experiences due to physiological differences).

Florian Kräutli has designed and created malleable magnetic curtains that retain their shape. Clunky elegance.

Embodied Cognition “is a growing research program in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the development of cognitive processes.” Learn more about this increasingly important area from this website. (via MindHacks)

Gimme gimme one of the Emotiv Brain-Computer Interface headsets. No contact gel required. Of course you could always build your own based on designs from the OpenEEG project.

Neat video of a time fountain optical illusion. Looks like water is running backward defying gravity and hanging in mid-air.

Are you a hacker (maker) or a painter? Or both? Or neither? Which of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures do you belong to? Paul Graham’s essay on Hackers and Painters may be of interest.

Fascinating talk given by Professor Mark Reed from Yale talking about The Next Frontier: Bioelectronic Interfaces (video).

I’m curled up with a bug and head cold so today I’m posting a Link Bucket instead of the normal long Tuesday post. Enjoy.

Looks Tasty – see the world with your tongue.

For the last few years I’ve been keeping my eye on the emerging transdisciplinary field of Augmented Cognition. On the AugCog website it is defined as an emerging field of science that seeks to extend a user’s abilities via computational technologies, which are explicitly designed to address bottlenecks, limitations, and biases in cognition and to improve decision making capabilities. Is it a repackaging of a human information processing approach to HCI, or something more? Either way it has interesting potential.

Takes your breath away – UDF SkyWalker is a massive interactive image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The image shows 10,000 galaxies from when the universe was only 800 million years old. You could also try out GEMS SkyWalker. I wonder how many of those galaxies are now teaming with life?

Isn’t it strange the way faces look so different? Yet we easily recognise that a face is a face. Imagine waking up tomorrow and everyone’s face has disappeared. Each face is replaced with a blank unexpressive blob. Don’t worry about the eating, seeing, speaking and breathing bits – in this brave new faceless world we can still speak and eat, etc, all without a face.

In Faceless Land would you be more or less easily able to tell when someone is lying to you? Think how many times you’ve chatted with someone close who says one thing yet you know from their eyes, lips, nose and cheeks that they mean the opposite.

For a fascinating article about the science behind our ability to read faces checkout The Naked Face (free download) written by Malcom Gladwell, published in the New Yorker a few years ago.

From the article I learnt that most of us are absolutely terrible at telling whether people are lying. We’re so bad that when it comes to strangers we might as well flip a coin as guess whether they are telling the truth or not. Less than 1 percent of people are extremely good at telling whether others are lying.

How do these the super face readers do it? What do they see in the human face that normal people don’t notice? Psst, Gladwell’s article provides a few answers.

Paul Ekman is one of the pioneering researchers into understanding facial expressions. In the 1960s he helped establish that facial expressions are universal. He also found that in a limited way if you physically arrange your face to mimic an emotion then you begin to feel that emotion! There’s lots more brain food on Ekman’s website via his freely available articles and book chapters.

Ok, that’s it for now with the science – I’ll be back to this topic again as its very relevant, interesting and has lots of potential, e.g. Affective Computing (MIT Media Lab Group), HCI + Emotions (paper discussing applications), etc.

How does face reading relate to User Designer? Computers and other digital tools are currently face blind, to them we are all living in Faceless Land. Cutting edge research has begun to crack the problem of facial recognition but we are still a long way off from having systems that recognise facial expressions with the same accuracy as super face readers.

What are the implications when we can design digital artifacts that read our faces as well as super face readers? Add in a dash of smart materials that can intelligently re-shape themselves, and out pops ideas such as self-reshaping comfort blankets that reassure a child by mimic’ing the movement of a parent’s face. The blanket might be able to “smile” without looking like a face – it creases itself here and it creases itself there.

Or make-up that stimulates your facial muscles to induce you to arrange your face into a smile…smile on the outside so you smile on the inside.

Or a sales technique where the salesperson’s office furniture, cups, chairs and any surface begins to look a little bit like the potential buyer’s face. If it was done subtly enough it might be more reassuring than creepy. Here’s lookin at an office chair lookin like yourself, human.

Many many years ago myself and friends went through a short phase of playing Tic-Tac-Toe (TTT), also called Noughts and Crosses. You win this simple two player game by forming a horizontal, vertical or diagonal straight line of three Xs or three Os. If both players play properly then neither player can win and the game finishes as a draw.

Early in the 90s Jiajie Zhang, as part of his PhD, did a number of experiments where he tested how well people could play TTT against a computer. What he wondered was whether different visual representations effected people’s ability to play the simple childhood game of TTT. Below are four (A to D) different graphical and conceptual layouts of TTT. If you play the (C) Shape version of TTT would you win more or less than if you play against the computer on the (D) Colour version of TTT?

Each of these graphical representations is called an isomorph of TTT. When you use these isomorphs to play TTT you are trying to solve the same problem as in TTT except the problem is presented differently, i.e. to win you still need to create a group of three items.

When playing (A) Line you colour three circles in a line to win, (B) Number you colour three circles so the numbers add to 15, (C) Shape you colour three circles so they share at least one shape in common and (D) Colour you colour three circles so they share at least one common colour.

What he found was that people’s ability to play TTT, this simple childhood game, was seriously effected by what isomorph version of TTT they played on! In one experiment he found that more than 50% of the players failed to get 10 draws in a row in the first 50 games when they played on the (B) Number version.

Depending on the computer’s opening moves (he did a number of experiments where he controlled what sequence of opening moves the computer could make) he showed that (A) Line was easier than (D) Colour, which was easier than (C) Shape which was around the same hardness as (B) Number.

Not only did the visual representation effect how well players did, but what options they had for their next move on the visual representation also effected their playing ability.

For the full paper with far more details about the experimental results you should download at least one of Zhang’s papers about the research The Interaction between Perceptual and Cognitive Processes in a Distributed Problem Solving Task.

A good starting point for learning more about this area is to read about representational determinism and distributed cognition. Mike Scaife’s and Yvonne Rogers paper External cognition: how do graphical representations work? is a good introduction.

Do you think people’s ability to play the isomorphic versions of TTT was affected by their familiarity with the graphical layouts? If a player was given enough practice would they play TTT as well no matter how the game looked? If they could practice would the speed at which they learn to play better be due to the visual representation? Why would one visual representation be easier to learn with than another?

The benefit of this research is it highlights an interesting danger of an individual centered user experience: People could end up shaping and creating tools that make it subtly hard to use the tools for thinking and problem solving. For example if you were an accountant or scientist looking at lots of numbers there is software that makes it easier to create visualisations of the numbers: How do you know that your visualisation isn’t playing with your mind by making it harder to think about the numbers?

You can find out more about their research at the LEURRE project website, where they wrote about their work experimenting with Artificial Life Control in Mixed Societies.

Separately MIT’s Rodney Brooks and others have been speculating about controlling insects and other creatures via brain implants Can cyborg moths bring down terrorists?

There are also examples where social behaviours, such as altruism, occur in other species Ape Aid: Chimps share altruistic capacity with people.

Now imagine designing a living space, a house, where tiny robot (overlords) carry out constant pest control. Not pest control practiced in an aggressive kill-everything-that-isn’t-human manner. Instead take a subtle holistic approach, which may be more sustainable and environmentally sounder than spraying all kinds of chemicals into our living spaces.

Pest control could be carried out by having the robots exert peer pressure on the insects. Reshaping / redesigning the behaviour of the insects by fooling them into doing what we want, i.e. have a set of tiny ant robots create Follow Me trails that lead away from inside your house. Or get spiders with robotic brains to encourage other spiders to build webs around your porch light. So at night moths are snagged in spider webs rather than swarming into your house when you open the porch door.

There are lots of other possibilities of adapting / redesigning group behaviours by controlling and influencing a few individuals in a group. For example encourage swarms of fish to swim into waiting nets, or encourage animals to eat food waste from dumps so the waste gets “recycled naturally”.

Of course there are negative implications, such as potentially throwing the ecological balance out. Or it’d become possible to literally send a plague of locusts to attack your annoying neighbour’s farm.

Insects and their behaviours as design materials!?

For when you’re in a dancing mood and craving some eye candy: lots and lots of music videos “that overlap the music video format with architecture, landscape and/or urbanism”.

Get lost in a world of great Human-Computer Interaction, Usability and Interaction Design resources with the excellent HCI Bibliography.

Of course, not forgetting a big welcome to all the new blog subscribers. There’s a load of you! I’m all ears for your interesting links and suggestions.

On idealist you can read about lots of (possible) inventions or share your ideas and creativity. I’d like to get my hands on one of those cutting scales.

Lots and lots of usability and online accessibility tools that perform automated evaluations.

Tomorrow night the Alchemist Cafe in Dublin is meeting where the there’ll be a talk by Dr Vaughan Bell (who writes one of my favourite blogs: Mind Hacks) on the “Science of Hypnotism”.

Yep, Helvetica was entertaining. There was a big big turn out for it in Dublin.

Ooops, nearly forgot – SEED art + science salon is on tonight with a presentation by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac.

During the talk he discusses the implications of some experiments which demonstrate that giving people choice doesn’t necessarily lead to increased satisfaction, and can even have the opposite effect. More choice may impact upon the formation of Synthetic Happiness.

In one (free-choice paradigm) experiment people were given a choice of six Monet prints. They had to rank the prints according to desirability. Then they were told they could have one of prints ranked third or fourth. A few weeks later the same people were asked to re-rank the same set of prints. Lo and behold the print they had was ranked higher than the one they originally preferred most!

They were happier with what they had than what they didn’t have. Some follow on research established that if there was the possibility they could change their choice they would be less inclined to be happy with what they had.

In an Introduction to Cognitive Dissonance there’s a more detailed description of the first free-choice paradigm experiment run by J.W. Brehm in 1956. If you’re interested you could have a look at the related “spreading of alternatives”.

I wonder what are the implications of a malleable world for the generation of synthetic happiness? Will people be more dissatisfied because they constantly have a choice about altering the physical and functional form of their objects (e.g. phones, door handles, etc) and tools?

An interesting Evolutionary Psychology Primer by Leda Cosmides (Psychology) and John Tooby (Anthropology), University of California Santa Barbara.

Want to take part in a short online research study into the connections between music and personality? If you’re interested and live in the UK or Ireland you can pop over here for more details.

Are you for or against Customisable UI’s?