Some of the ideas I’ll post are fun, others are tamer and move obviously useful. I enjoy the fun slightly left-of-field ideas as they’re good for HCI / design conversations, inspiration and follow-on idea creation.

Below I outline three related ideas, which I’ve called FlowOut TV, Pocket CAVE and Half-Real Toys.

FlowOut TV is the first idea and its a bit of fun. The idea is motivated by the question: Can watching TVs and/or playing games on TVs be made more immersive, without having to use 3D displays? Imagine if TVs and computer displays had multiple pico projectors built into them, where each projector points in a different direction. Shown above is a quick sketch of the technology for FlowOut TV. The projectors are mounted on motors so they can point in different directions and project images onto the walls, ceilings and floors around the TV. Included in the pico projectors are video cameras, which can see the area the pico projectors project onto (video cameras enable interactivity).

As you watch FlowOut TV, the projectors are used to enhance the video shown on the main screen. Now imagine you’re sitting at home watching a FlowOut TV, while the screen shows a man dashing along a city street. The street at his feet becomes part of your sitting room because the street is projected onto the floor in front of the FlowOut TV. The sky above the man’s head is projected onto the ceiling, and the crowds walking by the running man are projected onto the walls to the left and right of the FlowOut TV. As the story progresses, the FlowOut TV finds a picture frame in your sitting room, and begins projecting relevant parts of the story into that – such as photographs of the main character’s family. In yet other parts of the story the couch you are sitting on has an image of victorian fabric projected onto it, because the main character is visiting a victorian home. It may even be possible to have the faces of those around you “painted” by the projectors, so they look like characters in the film (give everyone watching Avatar blue skin?!). You can easily imagine lots of ways stories can be woven into your environment.

Now extend the FlowOut TV idea a little further, imagine your laptop screen has the same pico projectors builtin. Fun for computer games? Games could project gloves and body armor onto your arms and wrists…as you move your arms the projected armor would stay projected onto your body, while the walls around you flash with incoming blasts of laser fire! Or more sedately, Facebook status updates could be projected onto family portraits that are near your laptop.

Iterate the idea further, add in front and back facing pico projects and build it into a mobile phone. Suddenly you have a portable CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), where any room you walk into can easily be turned into an immersive virtual reality environment. To turn a room into a CAVE, all you need to do is take the FlowOut phone out, place it on a stable surface (optional), let it examine the room so it can figure out the room’s shape and surfaces, then it can project images onto the walls and surfaces around you. Since it has builtin cameras, it can also track how you move around, and could make any surface interactive as long as the cameras can see your physical actions. Prototypes of a portable CAVE could easily be built – its idea number two and I’m calling it a Pocket CAVE (though I prefer the less snappy name CAVE-In-Yer-Pocket).

A final iteration is adding pico projectors with video cameras to kids toys. Imagine building it into a toy car, and as the car is “driven around” a road is projected in front of the car, or grandparents watching from 1000 miles away are projected into the room and they interactively draw the road for the car to follow. There are all kinds of Half-Real Toys (one part projected, one part real), where the act of playing with them in different ways leads to different interactive surfaces getting projected into the surrounding environment. For toys, I’m unsure whether adding projected images is a good or bad idea? It could easily be implemented badly, where the projection replaces the joy of imagining roads and worlds.

Right, enough for now – this post is getting too long. There are lots more ideas which fall out of the above, I’ll follow up with another few in the next blog post.

Bosch have enhanced the night vision system system in cars, so that it provides smartly enhanced high contrast images of the road ahead at night. Clever but would you trust it to properly identify which parts of the road are critical for highlighting?

For the last few years I’ve been using and really liked Sony’s eBook Reader, the PRS500. Yup, I was an early adopter and altogether unsure whether I wanted to give up paper books! Recently there’s been an explosion of electronic readers, lead by Amazon’s Kindle. Within the next few years we’re going to see bendable, foldable and colourful electronic paper. For those of you who are design minded and interested in using E-Paper to invent new kinds of interactive visual displays and devices, here’s a handy guide for learning more about E-Paper technology.

Fascinating The Secret History of Silicon Valley – just over an hour long but well worth watching.

How aesthetically beautiful are your photos? Try out Acquine, an Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine. Welcome to the brave new world of computational aesthetics!

Clever – video of evolving a human face using a genetic algorithm. A face detector is used for the fitness function.

Time to start gaming for mental health?

Haunting and beautiful sand art “animation” – very neat and worth the 9 minutes.

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).

Me likes MOY – design and adapt the visual design of your car…in real-time! Probably a bit distracting but I suspect it could be useful for making your car visually pop-out in dangerous low-vision driving conditions? MOY is a design concept from Elvis Tomljenovic “The idea behind MOY concept is that everyone can design their own car on their own computer and then apply the design to the vehicle using wireless data transfer or share it with other people through web-site, forum, e-mail etc. To those who lack the necessary skills or time to create their own design, we offer the option of downloading ready made designs. The vehicles are interconnected, so the change is possible in motion. ”

Interesting article in MIT Sloan Management Review on Cracking the Code of Mass Customization. You can register for free to access it for free. The authors identify three required capabilities for mass customization companies. (found via Mass Customization & Open Innovation News)

Read Core77′s writeup Physical pixels: design for the not so near future on the Organic User Interfaces panel at CHI 09, which I previously mentioned. Is it a bit too futuristic? Psst, the answer is no – as long as futuristic innovations feedback into here and now innovations.

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.

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.

Read about Buckminster Fuller – architect, inventor, innovator, designer, futurist.

Evolution at work Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab.

User Designer has been very quiet because I was on holidays and attending the Advanced Visual Interfaces 2008 conference, where I presented Perceptual Usability: Predicting changes in visual interfaces & designs due to visual acuity differences. Yet again AVI was an enjoyable conference with lots of friendly faces. Unfortunately its only on every two years.

While in Italy I headed to Pompeii and unexpectedly stumbled upon a 2000 year old bistable optical illusion mosaic in The House of the Faun. Wow. I hadn’t realised the Romans and Greeks used optical illusions in their art. Below is a photo of the mosaic:

Fashionable Technology is a just released book on The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, and fashion, design and science is a highly promising and topical subject. Offered here is a compact survey of the theory involved and an explanation of the role technology plays in a fabric or article of clothing. (found via architectradure)

Therein lies the future – as a follow-on to my post Metamatter: Self-Reshapable Materials check out Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science. CTIHP is a report sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Commerce (DOC), so its worth paying attention to. There’s also the follow-on Managing Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Innovations: Converging Technologies In Society.

Arthur Shaprio, vision scientist at Bucknell University, has setup a new blog featuring visual illusions with explanations of why they occur. I particularly like his Lucy in the Sky illusion.

Beautiful – The Singing, Ringing Tree.

Very neat – A Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods from Visual-Literacy.org. Hover your mouse over any of the entries and up pops the related visualisation.

Excellent, the 2nd Irish Human Computer Interaction Conference is going to be on on the 19th and 20th of September in University College Cork, Ireland. Submission date is June 13th, 2008. Get writing! For more details keep an eye on the 2008 iHCI website.

Get a very brief glimpse Inside Microsoft’s Research Labs. If you want more depth wander over to Microsoft Research’s website – while there have a look at the recently released report Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the year 2020.

Recently I’ve been reflecting on Science 2.0, especially wondering what my research practices will be post-PhD. Science 2.0 (or whatever its getting called this month) is a much more open approach to science. Scientific America has a good introductory article explaining it. For example Science 2.0 scientists put their lab books online, writing about failures as well as success’ while making early stage research work (pre-publication) available for all to read about. Like others I suspect that the rise of the Internet inevitably leads to the emergence of Science 2.0, with a corresponding increased fluidity of idea exchange and cross pollination. There’ll probably be some of the same kind of issues occurring as in other digital media industries, i.e. ignore the openness, then fight the openness and finally embrace it. Admittedly the process of figuring out how to make Science 2.0 work fairly is going to interesting.

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?

Lovely overview about The History Of Visual Communication.

A bunch of interviews with User Experience pioneers.

Can you touch it? Workshop on designing multi-touch interaction techniques for displays (thanks Aaron). Invent a new interaction technique for the likes of Microsoft’s Surface and the DiamondTouch.

Can you sing it? World’s First HCI Rap

Chill out and sketch a personal kaleidoscope. Interactive realtime feedback on how your design changes over time.

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.