Situated Research's Blog

How good design can make users effective

It is an honest question: how smart are your users? The answer may surprise you: it doesn’t matter. They can be geniuses or morons, but if you don’t engage their intelligence, you can’t depend on their brain power.

Far more important than their IQ (which is a questionable measure in any case) is their Effective Intelligence: the fraction of their intelligence they can (or are motivated to) apply to a task.

Take, for example, a good driver. They are a worse driver when texting or when drunk. (We don’t want to think about the drunk driver who is texting.) An extreme example you say? Perhaps, but only by degree. A person who wins a game of Scrabble one evening may be late for work because they forgot to set their alarm clock. How could the same person make such a dumb mistake? Call it concentration, or focus, we use more of our brain when engaged and need support when we are distracted. Read more »

Sony is talking crazy, indicating that games may be able to tell if you’re lying or depressed just ten years down the road. We’ll stick with growing crops, thanks.

Seriously, when do games stop being games and cross over into virtual reality? This was the question I asked Nvidia months ago at ECGC 2011, and was told there will always be a market for the high-end PC gamer with the rig nearly the size of a bookcase. But putting visual realism aside, what will happen when games suddenly stop acting like games, and become more like a self-aware super AI that could possibly one day sing you happy birthday or annihilate the human race? Read more »

Image: The interactive experience at UNSW’s iCinema Centre. Source: The Australian

Lost in cyberspace

You only have to be the parent of a child over the age of seven to know what I’m talking about: the vacant eyes so preoccupied by what’s on screen that they can’t focus on your face for more than a few seconds before being drawn back into the cyberworld.

As you talk, your little darling types or toggles. “Are you listening to me?” you ask, only to be told in a precocious tone: “Yeahhhh. I’m multitasking, Mum.” Read more »

A new augmented reality shopping platform for Xbox Kinect will allow users to try on clothes in true 3-D, share photos with friends, and store wish-listed items on smartphones for shopping on-the-go.

Virtual reality shopping just got a lot more real–and could soon become a lot more mainstream. “KinectShop” (working title), an augmented reality shopping platform for the Xbox Kinect, exploits the system’s new finger-recognition technology to allow shoppers to grab items from an unlimited shelf of clothes, see how accessories look at multiple angles, and share the photos with friends on Twitter and Facebook for a quick thumbs-up or down. Read more »

You are playing a video game, and your avatar is creeping into a haunted house at the dead of night. Suddenly, you freeze in your chair. Something is crawling up your back…

Whether this idea appeals or not, researchers at Disney have made such sensations possible by inventing a system that fools players into thinking that objects are moving against their skin. Read more »

Imagine you could drive your car using only your thoughts. German researchers have just made that possible – and they have the video to prove it. Following his recent interview on the Robots Podcast about autonomous vehicles, Raul Rojas, an AI professor at the Freie Universitat Berlin, and his team have demonstrated how a driver can use a brain interface to steer a vehicle. Read more »

It may be an unfortunate commentary on society that including words like “moron” and “idiot” in the title of a post garner considerably more traffic than words like “success” and “charity” but it is a fact. Read more »

With the former glory of old, linear media fading, Melody Ayres-Griffiths examines just what the new media artform known as ‘transmedia’ is, and how it will engage an increasingly discerning yet time-starved populace in an immersive and interactive way. Read more »

When the iPhone feels your pain: Smartphones are smart, but tomorrow’s gadgets will have emotional intelligence

Computerworld – We love our gadgets. But they treat us with an indifference that sometimes feels like contempt. They’re like cats.

But soon, they’ll act more like dogs – perceptive of how we feel, and reacting to our moods by joining in on our elation or treading lightly when we’re angry. Read more »

Olivia Wilde stars in the upcoming sci-fi movie 'Tron: Legacy.'

“Tron: Legacy,” opening Friday, is a case of past and present colliding with a future vision that has come true.

Nearly 30 years ago, Disney‘s original “Tron” hit the big screen with a mixture of computer-generated effects and wacky science fiction concepts unseen before. Its man-inside-of-a-video-game concept was perfect for the newborn Pac-Man era, and the standup Tron video game was like an instant companion piece to the film: Leave the multiplex, hit the arcade. Read more »