Some day soon I’ll do a proper writeup about the PhD, but in short I was looking at the effect individual differences in low-level vision have on the user experience of HCI designs – a fun fusion of interface / information visualisation design, vision science / optometry, eye physiology and probabilistic modeling.

Anyways lets get started again with a Link Bucket, enjoy!

Did you know that Attractive Things Work Better, written by HCI guru Don Norman.

John M. Carroll, one of the fathers of HCI, writes about the History of HCI (thanks Mads Soegaard @ Interaction-Design.org).

CHI 2009, one of the main HCI conferences has just finished, read about a few neat ideas in The Stranger Side of CHI 2009.

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.

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).

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?