Touch Usability

Touchscreens at the Clever Dog Lab

At the Clever Dog Lab in Vienna, researchers use a "computer-automated touchscreen testing procedure for studying learning, social, and physical cognition in the dog."

I learned about this in a radio documentary called King Solomon's Ring from CBC's Ideas show (you can find the audio here: Ideas podcast or on iTunes). The documentary was about ethology -- the study of animal behavior, and about Konrad Lorenz, one of the field's founders. King Solomon's Ring is also the name of a classic book by Lorenz.

The dogs use their noses to activate the touchscreen, and apparently dogs do it well but it takes some instruction. I'm guessing it's a little like touchscreen usability studies with humans, but with more screen wipes. From the page for dog owners interested in participating:

We employ the computer-automated touch-screen testing procedure to study physical cognitive abilities (knowledge of how the physical world works). But first of all, it is necessary to find out whether dogs behave similarly when they are confronted with a similar problem in reality and on the screen.

From previous studies we know that dogs are able to find a hidden object even if considerable time has passed since they witnessed the hiding event. Dogs also show typical errors in their searching behaviour when a human experimenter hides the object. Thus, in this project, we want to investigate whether dogs can solve a hide-and-seek task on the touch-screen and whether they have similar error patterns on the touch-screen as in reality. I test the dogs’ performance in ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ (Touch-screen) conditions. In the virtual condition, I test them either with or without the presence of a hiding agent.

Dogs need a considerable amount of time to learn to work with the touch-screen. For optimal learning performance they and they owners should visit the lab at least once a week. A training occasion consists of 2-4 sessions. Each session has 29 trials. The auto feeder gives a dog a dry food pellet for every correct trial so a dog gets maximum 120 pellets per training occasion (altogether a small cup of dry food). A training occasion for a dog last from half an hour to one hour.

You can see a video of a dog doing a test at LiveScience, from a 2007 article: Dogs Do Well On Computers.

The lab has a web page showcasing some of their most enthusiastic study participants: Computer Freaks.

Inside Blackberry's Optical Trackpad

Over at the official Blackberry blog, they've posted a glimpse of the optical sensing technology in the new trackpad that replaces the trackball for navigation on some models: Inside the Trackpad: A Blackberry Science Lesson.

Interesting CHI discussion

James Landay has started an interesting (and very lengthy) discussion at his blog about the CHI conference review process and many related things: I give up on CHI/UIST. If you liked Greenberg and Buxton's 2008 paper and panel about how CHI needs to accept a broader type of work (especially papers about systems rather then techniques) then you might like this, as it extends and adds to that discussion. (And both Greenberg and Buxton add their thoughts.)

Laptops in Space!

This NASA video of the recent space shuttle mission shows some neat shots of a computer workstation with a big array of laptops (ThinkPad X series with TrackPoint and no touchpad), joysticks, and other physical controls. No touchpads or touchscreens in sight. Accidental touch contact would be a big problem up there.

Video is embedded below (click through for much higher resolution version at YouTube).

I've been watching the new (and kind of mediocre) TV show Defying Gravity, which is an interesting contrast to these pictures. The spaceship on Defying Gravity is much more pristine and has sexy touchscreens all over -- keyboards and joysticks are far too boring for science fiction.

(Via Boing Boing Gadgets.)

The Hand by Frank Wilson

David Birnbaum of Immersion has posted a good review of Frank Wilson's 1999 book The Hand: How its use shapes the brain, language, and human culture, a book that's going on my to-read list... Excerpt:

The Hand by Frank Wilson is a rare treat. It runs the gamut from anthropology (both the cultural and evolutionary varieties), to psychology, to biography. Wilson interviews an auto mechanic, a pupeteer, a surgeon, a physical therapist, a rock climber, a magician, and others—all with the goal of understanding the extent to which the human hand defines humanness.
Wilson is a neurologist who works with musicians who have been afflicted with debilitating chronic hand pain. As he writes about his many interviews, a few themes emerge that are especially relevant to my interests.

Link: The Hand (tactilicio.us)

Tactile Motion Aftereffect

This doesn't have anything to do with user interfaces, but it's kind of an interesting finding about tactile perception:

In the classic waterfall illusion, if you stare at the downward motion of a waterfall for some period of time, stationary objects -- such as rocks -- appear to drift upward. MIT neuroscientists have found that this phenomenon, called motion aftereffect, occurs not only in our visual perception but also in our tactile perception, and that these senses actually influence one another. Put another way, how you feel the world can actually change how you see it -- and vice versa.

In a paper published in the April 9 online issue of Current Biology, researchers found that people who were exposed to visual motion in a given direction perceived tactile motion in the opposite direction. Conversely, tactile motion in one direction gave rise to the illusion of visual motion in the opposite direction.

"Our discovery suggests that the sensory processing of visual and tactile motion use overlapping neural circuits," explained Christopher Moore of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and senior author of the paper. "The way something looks or feels can be influenced by a stimulus in the other sensory modality."

[...]

To test the effect of tactile motion on visual perception, adjacent rows of pins vibrated in rapid succession, creating the sensation of a tactile object sweeping up or down the subjects' fingertips. After 10 seconds of this stimulus, the monitor displayed a static pattern of horizontal stripes. Contrary to the prevailing assumption that vision always trumps touch, subjects perceived the stripes as moving in the opposite direction to the moving tactile stimulus.

Demos of the motion stimuli used in this study can be seen at http://web.mit.edu/~tkonkle/www/CrossmodalMAE.html.

Link: MIT News: How you feel the world impacts how you see it.

Jack Carroll on HCI history

Over at interaction-design.org there's a new essay by Jack Carroll outlining the history of HCI and related fields like UX, IxD, or whatever else the kids are calling it these days*.

Link: Human Computer Interaction. From the beginning:

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an area of research and practice that emerged in the early 1980s, initially as a specialty area in computer science. HCI has expanded rapidly and steadily for three decades, attracting professionals from many other disciplines and incorporating diverse concepts and approaches. To a considerable extent, HCI now aggregates a collection of semi-distinct fields of research and practice in human-centered informatics. However, the continuing synthesis of disparate conceptions and approaches to science and practice in HCI has produced a dramatic example of how different epistemologies and paradigms can be reconciled and integrated.

Carroll has also written or edited several books. The only one I've read (parts of) is HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks and found it very good, though be warned -- as the title says it's very theoretical.

(via Putting People First)

*I recommend you join the IxDA mailing list if you feel a hankering for daily bickering discussion about the meaning of all these different labels. :)

Seven ways to fool your sense of touch

New Scientist has a feature on "seven ways to fool your sense of touch": Tactile Illusions.

An excerpt:

Some tactile illusions have been known for a long time - one is named after Aristotle - but in general they have been harder to discover and demonstrate than visual illusions. "Optical effects are easily probed. You can study vision with a piece of paper or make fundamental discoveries using a slide projector," says Hayward. "Tactile effects are not so easy."
Now that researchers have started to develop new ways to probe the sense of touch, however, tactile illusions are enjoying a golden age. "There has been a surge in the past few years as it has become easier to manipulate and present stimuli," says Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford. As a result, in recent years we have seen the discovery of numerous tactile illusions that are no less mind-boggling than their visual counterparts.

Mobile Computing as a Discipline: CMU's new Mobility Research Center

From Government Computer News:

It’s a sign of having arrived when a new technology gets its own academic discipline. It happened more than 25 years ago for computer science. And some schools launched certificate programs in geospatial studies a couple of years ago.

Now Carnegie Mellon University is launching a new Mobility Research Center at its Silicon Valley site that will be a locus of research and teaching focused on mobile computing.

“There are billions of cell phone users all around the world, and their introduction to the use of computation and the Internet is going to be through use of this handheld platform, not through their desktop or laptop computers,” James Morris, professor of computer science and dean of Carnegie Mellon West, told GCN.

“The United States needs to have that perspective as we look at a global market for computing devices on the Internet.”

The multidisciplinary program will focus on context-aware applications and services, serendipitous collaboration and rich semantic information to enable novel data and media management, visualization and access.

“We have probably 30 faculty members who work in various areas — anything from antenna design [to] anthropology and psychology — and we’re getting a lot of these people together into teams to perform research to look at the way people are going to use mobile devices in the future,” Morris said.

Link: Mobile computing gets academic,

via ACM TechNews.

CMU page: CyLab Mobility Research Center.