Creativity Support Tools

Support tools are computational tools that allow users quick and easy exploration of interactions which are domain specific. The goal of these tools are to provide users support in hypothesis formation, deeper insights, speedy generation of alternatives and better dissemination of results.

Below is a set of proposed user interface design principles that support rapid exploration and easy experimentation, which fall in line with the goal of support tools:

1. Support exploration
2. Support many different styles
3. Support collaboration
4. Support open interchange
5. Make it as simple as possible
6. Invent things that you would want to use yourself
7. Balance user suggestions with observation and participatory processes
8. Design for designers

For users with a creative side, creativity support tools use computers as a medium to promote creative designs and expressions. They allow users to evaluate these proposed designs and provide easy backtracking.

Creativity support tools generally fall under 4 categories:

1. Sketch-based interaction
2. Tangible user interface
3. Animation
4. Touch interface

The more interesting of these 4 are tangible user interfaces and touch interface. Tangible user interfaces (TUI) allow users to interact with digital information using their physical environment. An example of a TUI is the I/O Brush developed by MIT which allow users to make use of colours, textures and even movement of objects in everyday life to paint their own picture.

As you can see, the I/O Brush is a very simple tool that allows users with no knowledge to catch on to it quickly. In addition, it promotes exploration of the many different styles of painting and drawing. Most importantly of all, there is no limit as to what kind of texture, pattern or colour available for use as the brush is able to pick up anything you wish to use.

Touch interfaces have the ability to recognize the presence of multiple points of contact with the screen surface. This allows the implementation of advanced functions such as pinching/zooming and drawing. One such example of a touch interface is the sand canvas. A sand canvas enables users to create drawings that emulate the task of drawing on sand.

As shown in the video, users make use of many different kinds of hand movements (e.g. hand sweeps, fingertips, canvas pour etc) across the screen surface to create many different scenes. This is a much more interesting way of giving input as compared to simply using a mouse or stylus to draw since our hands are capable of coming up with a bigger variety of movements and textures than the usual input devices we have.

The future of creativity support tools is certainly a promising one. Just by looking at videos of these interesting interfaces makes one's creative juices flow. It certainly made mine flow.

References

1. http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/?id=6
2. http://www.aipo.es/articulos/4/1.pdf

Computer speech recognition and voice-user interface

A voice-user interface (VUI) is an interface which enables a human to communicate with a computer through his voice (speech). Today this probably means giving simple instructions or/and going through a automated process through your phone. But why? The potential for communicating with your voice is huge! It is the way humans communicate with each other so why couldn't this be the way we communicate with computers and electronic devices as well?

Well, for a start the way a computer understands the speech is by analyzing the digitalized waveform into its frequency components. Then compares this spectrogram pattern to known patterns for particular sounds. This is a very complex thing to do with so many errors that can happend, for examples heavy accents will easily be misunderstood.

If Computer voice recognition became good enough (meaning even better than a keyboard) we will surely see a huge change in how different devices looks. Can you even imagine removing the keyboard and computer mouse? You probably can, since Apple already took a step in this direction with their iPad, thanks to the multi-touchscreen. Perfect voice recognition would take this process even further.

However, one of the latest progressions in this field is also something from apple, Siri, the new voice assistant in iPhone 4S. This is far from perfect, but still very useful in everyday life. Check out this video to see how it (she) works:

Even though computers and electronic devices eventually will understand perfectly what we say, it is only 7% of our communication that comes from what we actually say, the rest is body language and how we sound. But wouldn't it be a bit sad if our computers would understand our ironic shouts and angry gesture's towards them?

References:

http://www.voiceworks.co.za/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_user_interface

Robotic Interface

Robotic interfaces now become popular more than ever are defined as a connection between a person and product. The most popular types of robotic interfaces range from the automated voice systems over telephones to actual robotic receptionists. One of the best thing about robotic interfaces is the fact that they help to get rid of amount of time usually spent by users therefore help saving budget.

Let's say nowadays, the speed of data collection has been growing faster and faster, a group of people searching for information would be more benificial if applying easily-used and friendly rebotic interface connect them and the experimental data sought after.

General research on HRI (Human-robot interaction) which covered this topic includes

• Methods for perceiving humans
• Methods for motion planning
• Cognitive models

There are actually a lot of applications of HRI such as in following popular fields

• Entertainment
• Education
• Field robotics
• Home and companion robotics
• Hospitality
• Rehabilitation and Elder Care

Reference:

http://www2.mse.vt.edu/inamm/RoboticInterface/tabid/864/Default.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93robot_interaction