Cognition

Teaching Video Game Characters Natural Body Language

Video game characters with natural responses to human body language

Researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London have been using theater performers to design computer software capable of reading and replicating the way in which humans communicate with their bodies.

Dr Marco Gillies from the Department of Computing has made virtual characters more believable by enlisting actors to teach them body movement. The actors interact with members of the public through a screen, and their responses to specific body language are memorized as algorithms by the software.

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Finding Out What They Think: A Rough Primer To User Research, Part 2

[The following is the second of two articles by college professor and researcher Ben Lewis-Evans on games user research methodology (see Part 1, which covered focus groups, heuristics, and questionnaires, as well as giving a grounding in the topic of user research in general. In this article, Lewis-Evans covers interviews, observational methods (including think out loud and contextual inquiry), game metrics, and biometrics.]

Interviews

Much like a questionnaire — a topic covered in the last installment — an interview is for collecting subjective data. However, the face-to-face nature of an interview means that you can be more interactive in your data collection, which if done correctly, can lead to very rich data. However, it is also obviously quite time-consuming, and it is harder to analyze and quantify the data you get at the end.

The quality of what you get out of an interview will also depend greatly on your own skill as an interviewer, so here are some tips.

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Finding Out What They Think: A Rough Primer To User Research, Part 1

[In this first article in a new series, college professor and user research Ben Lewis-Evans takes a look at different methods of game user research, offering up a handy guide to different ways you can collect useful information about your game.]

This article, and its forthcoming followup, is intended to give a rough idea to developers of several different methods that can be used in games user research.

However, many, many books have been written on research methodology and I cannot cover everything. Therefore these two articles cannot be taken as completely comprehensive.

In the first of the articles I will be covering a few general points about Games User Research and then discussing three methods, focus groups, heuristic evaluation and questionnaires in some detail.

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Buttons Were An Inspired UI Hack, But Now We’ve Got Better Options

Josh Clark on the future of touch and other types of UI.

If you’ve ever seen a child interact with an iPad, you’ve seen the power of the touch interface in action. Is this a sign of what’s to come — will we be touching and swiping screens rather tapping buttons? I reached out to Josh Clark (@globalmoxie), founder of Global Moxie and author of “Tapworthy,” to get his thoughts on the future of touch and computer interaction, and whether or not buttons face extinction.

Clark says a touch-based UI is more intuitive to the way we think and act in the world. He also says touch is just the beginning — speech, facial expression, and physical gestures are on they way, and we need to start thinking about content in these contexts.

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Corning’s Second Day of Glass

Nearly a year ago, Corning (maker of Gorilla Glass), released a video encapsulating it’s vision of the future. It’s since gotten 17 million views on YouTube, and started numerous discussions and responses.

In the video, Corning predicted large scale desktop touchscreen displays, bigger video screens, and dynamic billboards. And while much of the video is still in the future, the OLED TV’s shown by LG at this year’s CES do seem to bring the video to life.

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Sony Says Games Will Read Emotions in 10 Years

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?

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How Microsoft’s Xbox 360 & Kinect Help Surgeons in the OR

Image: The avatar for Dr. Brian Ross welcomes participants to an online training session using Xbox chat technology (Stephen Brashear photos/PSBJ)

The sight of a surgeon playing “Grand Theft Auto” in the operating room might raise eyebrows, but it’s one example of how consumer technology is being repurposed to advance the practice of medicine.

Rising medical costs — bloated by expensive, complicated machines — are wrecking the nation’s economic health, while off-the-shelf consumer gadgets keep getting cheaper and more powerful. So the health care industry has discovered it can tap into the innovative wonders of an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 or an Android smartphone app.

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Utilize Available Screen Space

Summary: Websites and mobile apps both frequently cram options into too-small parts of the screen, making items harder to understand.

A computer screen’s precious pixels are the world’s most valuable real estate. Amazon’s Add to Cart button is 160×27 pixels, or 0.003 square feet (0.0003 m2) at a typical 100 dpi monitor resolution. You could crowd almost 800,000 Buy buttons onto the floor space of the average American home, which currently sells for $160,000. Even a single Buy button will often bring in more than that — let alone the revenue from 800,000 buttons.

Normally, when something is extremely valuable, you try to conserve it. But screen space shouldn’t be hoarded, it should be spent. I see too many designs that cram highly valuable content or action items into tiny spaces while wasting vast amounts of screen space.

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For IBM’s Watson technology, What Happens After “Jeopardy!”?

 

IBM’s Supercomputer Has Implications for Healthcare, Information Tech and More

Wouldn’t it be nice to have your very own supercomputer in your pocket?

If your laptop crashed while you were working on a major presentation, you could ask your portable expert to help diagnose the problem. If you wanted to bone up on Middle Eastern history, you could ask it to comb every document available and then wrap it all up in a simple summary (annotated, of course).

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