November 18, 2004
HCI Comments XIV
Haptic Techniques for Media Control, Scott S. Snibbe, Karon E. MacLean, Rob Shaw, Jayne Roderick, William L. Verplank, Mark Scheef, UIST 2001: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 199-208
This paper may has an incredible density of ideas. No less then six unique haptic devices and eleven different application scenarios are introduced. What has happened to these prototypes? An ACM search revealed just four subsequent citations. Further research on the prototypes would most likely be fruitful - the surface of possible applications has only been scratched here. Contacting either Scott Snibbe or Bill Verplank may be worthwhile.
I stumbled over the references to the demise of Interval Research and embarked on some research about the think tank. According to the Online Archive of California, most of Interval's documents are now held in Stanford's libraries: [http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf1s2001tx] It appears though that the records are not accessible to the Stanford community - permission of Interval's legal team is required. In 1999, Wired ran a long article about Interval [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.12/interval.html] and shortly thereafter Salon.com published a post-mortem: [http://www.salon.com/tech/log/2000/04/22/interval/]
Embodied User Interfaces for Really Direct Manipulation, Kenneth P. Fishkin, Anuj Gujar, Beverly L. Harrison, Thomas P. Moran, Roy Want, Communications of the ACM, March 2003, pp. 75-80
In their introduction, the authors argue that as GUIs have become dominant, the physical form factor of the computer - the box - has become anonymous and invisible. But why has the box become invisible? Why have we focused much more on developing GUIs instead of paying attention to form factors? The principal reason is precisely that GUIs are intangible and as such their creation, modification, augmentation is not controlled by the laborious and expensive manufacturing processes that control creation in the physical world. Standardized commodity hardware can also exploit economies of scale better than specialized devices.
"The devices are metaphorically related to similar noncomputational artifacts." Do we always need a noncomputational metaphor? It is surely helpful in explaining uses and modes of operation to non-experts, but they are constraining the user's imagination of what can be done with the device.
I fundamentally disagree with the author's discussion of the Palm hand held on the top of page 76 - I have been using various Palm PDAs for more than 5 years and the Palm never *was* my calendar. Instead, for me it is a bidirectional window to look at and modify my calendar, which itself is an intangible collection of data shared between and accessibly by a multitude of devices. When at home or in my office I always create and check entries on my desktop or notebook computer - both data input and output bandwidths are much higher than on the PDA. I only use the PDA on the road, when other methods of access are unavailable. My cellphone has another copy of the schedule to remind me of upcoming meetings. So let's not confuse the data and the device. Also, while it is true that the Palm was originally conceived as an electronic form of a paper personal organizer, much of its value to users today comes from its functioning as a general purpose platform with an open SDK. Many applications extending its functionality into completely different realms are available from 3rd parties. This suggests that it may be more promising to develop devices with form factors not tied to specific applications but to specific real world constraints (size,weight,modes of input/output) and let a large community of developers figure out what tasks such a device can support. Specialization can come later with add-ons to a general-purpose architecture.
Finally some notes on the presented techniques of page turning, scrolling, and tilting:
Page turning: a particularly bad example. At least half of the work here was done inside the GUI and not on the physical interface. I feel like adding any two buttons on the right/left side inside or outside the touchscreen would have led to similar result.
Scrolling: Sony developed a better analogy to turning a Rolodex wheel years ago with their scroll wheel built into cell phones and PDAs.
Tilting: the authors sidestep the issue of individual differences - settings for "neutral tilt" were derived as an average of users. A better approach would have been to let each user set their individual comfortable value (calibration).
Posted by Bjoern Hartmann at November 18, 2004 6:46 AM