HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION

LECTURE 4
virtual reality and 3D
interaction
positioning in 3D space
moving and grasping
seeing 3D (helmets and caves)
positioning in 3D space
 cockpit and virtual controls
 steering wheels, knobs and dials
… just like real!
 the 3D mouse
 six-degrees of movement: x, y, z
+ roll, pitch, yaw
 data glove
 fibre optics used to detect finger
position
 VR helmets
 detect head motion and possibly
eye gaze
 whole body tracking
 accelerometers strapped to
limbs or reflective dots and video
processing
pitch, yaw and roll

yaw

roll
pitch
3D displays
 desktop VR
 ordinary screen, mouse or
keyboard control
 perspective and motion give
3D effect
 seeing in 3D
 use stereoscopic vision
 VR helmets
 screen plus shuttered specs,
etc.
VR headsets
 small TV screen for each eye
 slightly different angles
 3D effect
VR motion sickness
 time delay
 move head … lag … display moves
 conflict: head movement vs. eyes
 depth perception
 headset gives different stereo distance
 but all focused in same plane
 conflict: eye angle vs. focus
 conflicting cues => sickness
 helps motivate improvements in technology
simulators and VR caves

 scenes projected on
walls
 realistic environment
 hydraulic rams!
 real controls
 other people
physical controls, sensors
etc.
special displays and gauges
sound, touch, feel, smell
physical controls
environmental and bio-sensing
dedicated displays
 analogue representations:
 dials, gauges, lights, etc.

 digital displays:
 small LCD screens, LED lights, etc.

 head-up displays
 foundin aircraft cockpits
 show most important controls
… depending on context
Sounds
 beeps, bongs, clonks, whistles and whirrs
(sound of something in rapid motion)

 used for error indications

 confirmation of actions e.g. keyclick

also see chapter 10

Touch, feel, smell
 touch and feeling important
 in games … vibration, force feedback
 in simulation … feel of surgical instruments
 called haptic devices

 texture, smell, taste

 current technology very limited
 physical controls

 specialist controls needed …

 industrial controls, consumer products,
etc.
easy-clean
smooth buttons

multi-function
control
large buttons
clear dials

tiny buttons
Environment and bio-sensing
 sensors all around us
 car courtesy light – small switch on door
 ultrasound detectors – security, washbasins
 RFID security tags in shops
 temperature, weight, location

 … and even our own bodies …

 iris
scanners, body temperature, heart rate,
galvanic skin response, blink rate
paper: printing and
scanning
print technology
fonts, page description,
WYSIWYG
scanning, OCR
Printing
 image made from small dots
 allows any character set or graphic to be
printed,
 critical features:
 resolution
 size and spacing of the dots
 measured in dots per inch (dpi)

 speed
 usually measured in pages per minute
 cost!!
Types of dot-based printers
 dot-matrix printers
 use inked ribbon (like a typewriter
 line of pins that can strike the ribbon, dotting the paper.
 typical resolution 80-120 dpi
 ink-jet and bubble-jet printers
 tiny blobs of ink sent from print head to paper
 typically 300 dpi or better .
 laser printer
 like photocopier: dots of electrostatic charge deposited on drum, which
picks up toner (black powder form of ink) rolled onto paper which is then
fixed with heat
 typically 600 dpi or better.
Printing in the workplace
 shop tills
 dot matrix
 same print head used for several paper rolls
 may also print cheques

 thermal printers
 special heat-sensitive paper
 paper heated by pins makes a dot
 poor quality, but simple & low maintenance
 used in some fax machines
Fonts
 Font – the particular style of text
Courier font
Helvetica font
Palatino font
Times Roman font
 §´µº¿Â Ä¿~ (special symbol)

 Size of a font measured in points (1 pt about 1/72”)

(vaguely) related to its height
This is ten point Helvetica
This is twelve point
This is fourteen point
This is eighteen point
and this is twenty-four point
Fonts (ctd)
Pitch
 fixed-pitch – every character has the same width
e.g. Courier
 variable-pitched – some characters wider
e.g. Times Roman – compare the ‘i’ and the “m”
Serif or Sans-serif
 sans-serif – square-ended strokes
e.g. Helvetica
 serif – with splayed ends (such as)
e.g. Times Roman or Palatino
Readability of text
 lowercase
 easy to read shape of words
 UPPERCASE
 better for individual letters and non-words
e.g. flight numbers: BA793 vs. ba793

 serif fonts
 helpsyour eye on long lines of printed text
 but sans serif often better on screen
Page Description Languages
 Pages very complex
 different fonts, bitmaps, lines, digitised photos, etc.

 Can convert it all into a bitmap and send to the printer

… but often huge !

 Alternatively Use a page description language

 sends a description of the page can be sent,
 instructions for curves, lines, text in different styles, etc.
 like a programming language for printing!

 PostScript is the most common

Screen and page
 WYSIWYG
 what you see is what you get
 aim of word processing, etc.
 but …
 screen: 72 dpi, landscape image
 print: 600+ dpi, portrait
 can try to make them similar
but never quite the same
 so … need different designs, graphics etc, for screen
and print
Scanners
 Take paper and convert it into a bitmap
 Two sorts of scanner
 flat-bed: paper placed on a glass plate, whole page converted into
bitmap
 hand-held: scanner passed over paper, digitising strip typically 3-4” wide

 Shines light at paper and note intensity of reflection

 colour or greyscale

 Typical resolutions from 600–2400 dpi

Scanners (ctd)
Used in
 desktop publishing for incorporating
photographs and other images
 document storage and retrieval systems,
doing away with paper storage
+ special scanners for slides and photographic
negatives
Optical character recognition
 OCR converts bitmap back into text
 different fonts
 createproblems for simple “template
matching” algorithms
 more complex systems segment text,
decompose it into lines and arcs, and
decipher characters that way
 page format
 columns, pictures, headers and footers
Paper-based interaction
 paper usually regarded as output only
 can be input too – OCR, scanning, etc.
 Xerox PaperWorks
 glyphs – small patterns of /\\//\\\
 used to identify forms etc.
 used with scanner and fax to control applications
 more recently
 papers micro printed - like wattermarks
 identify which sheet and where you are
 special ‘pen’ can read locations
 know where they are writing
 memory

short term and long term

speed, capacity, compression
formats, access
Short-term Memory - RAM
 Random access memory (RAM)
 on silicon chips
 100 nano-second access time
 usually volatile (lose information if power turned off)
 data transferred at around 100 Mbytes/sec

 Some non-volatile RAM used to store basic set-up

information

 Typical desktop computers:

64 to 256 Mbytes RAM
Long-term Memory - disks
 magnetic disks
 floppy disks store around 1.4 Mbytes
 hard disks typically 40 Gbytes to 100s of Gbytes
access time ~10ms, transfer rate 100kbytes/s

 optical disks
 use lasers to read and sometimes write
 more robust that magnetic media
 CD-ROM
- same technology as home audio, ~ 600 Mbytes
 DVD - for AV applications, or very large files
Blurring boundaries
 PDAs
 often use RAM for their main memory

 Flash-Memory
 used in PDAs, cameras etc.
 silicon based but persistent
 plug-in USB devices for data transfer
speed and capacity
 what do the numbers mean?

 some sizes (all uncompressed) …

 this book, text only ~ 320,000 words, 2Mb
 the Bible ~ 4.5 Mbytes
 scanned page ~ 128 Mbytes
 (11x8 inches, 1200 dpi, 8bit greyscale)
 digital photo ~ 10 Mbytes
 (2–4 mega pixels, 24 bit colour)
 video ~ 10 Mbytes per second
 (512x512, 12 bit colour, 25 frames per sec)
virtual memory
 Problem:
 running lots of programs + each program large
 not enough RAM

 Solution - Virtual memory :

 store some programs temporarily on disk
 makes RAM appear bigger

 But … swopping
 program on disk needs to run again
 copied from disk to RAM
 slows t h i n g s d o w n
Compression
 reduce amount of storage required
 lossless
 recover exact text or image – e.g. GIF, ZIP
 look for commonalities:
 text: AAAAAAAAAABBBBBCCCCCCCC 10A5B8C
 video: compare successive frames and store change
 lossy
 recover something like original – e.g. JPEG, MP3
 exploit perception
 JPEG: lose rapid changes and some colour
 MP3: reduce accuracy of drowned out notes
Storage formats - text
 ASCII - 7-bit binary code for to each letter and character
 UTF-8 - 8-bit encoding of 16 bit character set
 RTF (rich text format)
- text plus formatting and layout information
 SGML (standardized generalised markup language)
- documents regarded as structured objects
 XML (extended markup language)
- simpler version of SGML for web applications
Storage formats - media
 Images:
 many storage formats :
(PostScript, GIFF, JPEG, TIFF, PICT, etc.)
 plus different compression techniques
(to reduce their storage requirements)

 Audio/Video
 again lots of formats :
(QuickTime, MPEG, WAV, etc.)
 compression even more important
 also ‘streaming’ formats for network delivery
methods of access
 large information store
 long time to search => use index
 what you index -> what you can access
 simple index needs exact match
 forgiving systems:
 Xerox “do what I mean” (DWIM)
 SOUNDEX – Smith ~ Schmidt
 access without structure …
 free text indexing (all the words in a document)
 needs lots of space!!
processing and networks

finite speed (but also Moore’s law)

limits of interaction
networked computing
Finite processing speed
 Designers tend to assume fast processors, and make interfaces
more and more complicated

 But problems occur, because processing cannot keep up with all the
tasks it needs to do
 cursor overshooting because system has buffered keypresses
 icon wars - user clicks on icon, nothing happens, clicks on another, then
system responds and windows fly everywhere

 Also problems if system is too fast - e.g. help screens may scroll
through text much too rapidly to be read
Moore’s law
 computers get faster and faster!
 1965 …
 Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, noticed a pattern
 processor speed doubles every 18 months
 PC … 1987: 1.5 Mhz, 2002: 1.5 GHz
 similar pattern for memory
 but doubles every 12 months!!
 hard disk … 1991: 20Mbyte : 2002: 30 Gbyte
 baby born today
 record all sound and vision
 by 70 all life’s memories stored in a grain of dust!
the myth of the infinitely
fast machine
 implicit assumption … no delays
an infinitely fast machine
 what is good design for real machines?
 good example … the telephone :
 type keys too fast
 hear tones as numbers sent down the line
 actually an accident of implementation
 emulate in deisgn
Limitations on interactive
performance
Computation bound
 Computation takes ages, causing frustration for the user
Storage channel bound
 Bottleneck in transference of data from disk to memory
Graphics bound
 Common bottleneck: updating displays requires a lot of effort -
sometimes helped by adding a graphics co-processor optimised to take
on the burden
Network capacity
 Many computers networked - shared resources and files, access to
printers etc. - but interactive performance can be reduced by slow
network speed
Networked computing
Networks allow access to …
 large memory and processing
 other people (groupware, email)
 shared resources – esp. the web

Issues
 network delays – slow feedback
 conflicts - many people update data
 unpredictability