Screenshots of the Interface

Student Login

Student Login

Timetable – finger on a class

Timetable – radial menu open

Class Info page – finger over a menu item

Showing route from rec centre to MY221

Inside Murphy – route to MY221

The Victoria University (of Wellington), Where Am I (VUWAMi) interface

This navigation interface has been designed to make use of the touch features of today’s smartphones. The user communicates with the app via the use of radial menus and touching the area of importance. The “keyboard” is only employed where it makes the most sense in terms of speed, such as when searching for something that is only vaguely defined, i.e., somewhere close by to grab a bite, or when logging in for the first time. Radial menus that are related to the current view on the app pop up when the user touches and pauses for a moment on the screen. The user then slides their finger in the direction of the menu item of choice to open it up. The most commonly used or important menu items feature in the same place on every radial menu in every screen. Some menu items only feature on particular screens as they are only of importance to the task at hand. Research has shown that radial menus are easy to learn for novices and that speed increases with experience, thus meaning that the need to look down at the phone becomes almost unnecessary over time as muscle memory kicks in. The radial menu will pop up under wherever the user’s finger happens to be on the screen, though in some cases such as choosing an item in the timetable will bring up a contextually relevant radial menu to that event. Radial menus are used in choosing a destination that is known via scrolling through the list of campuses, buildings, levels and rooms.

Colour is the dominant aspect of the visual map, making it easier to merely glance at the phone to see where you are in relation to where you were and where you want to be. If the user opts for navigating via the visual map then they will find a number of features that make it easier to find where they are at every point in their journey and where they need to be. The buildings at the current location and destination and major landmarks are represented in 3D while all non-relevant information such as surrounding buildings are mere representative shapes of colour on the map. When navigating within a building, the destination is easily distinguishable by the use of vibrant contrasting colour to the surrounding areas. The route is lit up with little bright green feet that darken when that part of the route has been travelled over.

The user will always know where they need to go and where they have been at a glance and a mere touch.

The Intelligence of Touch (written description)

The Intelligence of Touch (images)

The Intelligence of Touch (video)

The Intelligence of Touch from pagesinclair on Vimeo.

An exploration into our sense of touch.

This is a video demo of my first year interaction design project that I did at the University of Victoria, Wellington. It shows how to interact with the designed object. This interactive object allowed users to explore their sense of touch and to gain an appreciation for the amazing ability we have to feel surface qualities and discern shapes by touch alone. It was purposefully built to shut out visual feedback to make the user focus on the use of touch to “see” an object.

If I had thought about it at the time I would have got rid of the furniture in the background and made sure that no cats could make a walk-on appearance during filming.

Reference:

Good Old Neon (2010). Arrange Yourselves from Best to Worst. On Radiant City [mp3 file]. Sourced from: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Good_Old_Neon/Radiant_City_Sample-free_Version/10_Arrange_Yourselves_from_Best_to_Worst under an Attribution NonCommercial License

Arrange Yourselves from Best to Worst (Good Old Neon) / CC BY-NC 3.0

DSDN112 Interaction Design: Storyboard

Storyboard: Closed Boxes

 

Storyboard: The inside story

 

DSDN112 Interaction Design: Interactive Object Outline

My plan is to create an interactive object that explores the tactile sense by excluding all other senses so only the sense of touch is used.

The object will consist of two boxes with holes to put hands in. One of the boxes will contain an object to be felt, and will have a variety of gloves attached to the holes where the hands go, except for one which will have no glove attached. The person will put their hands into the holes to touch a part of the object inside. The whole object is felt by placing hands in the holes. In the second box, they will sculpt what they felt, take the sculpture out and place it on a stand. After a few people have done this, their sculptures are compared to the original object to see how accurate their tactile sense is. A new object is then placed in the box, and the process starts again.

I am aiming to provide people with a completely tactile experience when using the interactive object, one that allows them to understand their sense of touch better through interacting with an object by touch alone and then attempting to sculpt by touch, what they felt.

DSDN142 Creative Coding: Final Images

Adaptable Form Final Images

Code for the Initial Form and the morphing of it.

The top left of the board is my initial form, and the remaining four forms in the first sequence were created by changing the values of the scale and angle variables, incrementing for the angle and incrementing and de-incrementing for the scale.

The second sequence of forms focused on changing angle, scale and rotation by incrementing and de-incrementing the values.

For the third sequence only the values for stroke weight and scale were changed. I found while iterating through values that the form slowly started taking on the form of a circle and by playing around with the values a bit more, the circle became more pronounced. Then when I continued to increment the stroke weight and scale values the circle slowly morphed into a square. The solidity of the forms surprised me as I had expected that by playing around with scale and line weight only, all that would happen would be a bulbous blobby mess slowly growing into just a white screen.

For the final two sequences, I played around with all the variables, so width, height, scale, angle, rotation and line weight all got a go at morphing the form from its original shape into new ones. I took the approach of “what if” when doing these, just to see what sort of forms could be achieved and how long it would take for it to dissolve into mere lines.

A snapshot of the form was saved every fifth frame.

I like variety of changes that have occurred while playing around with the variable’s values, some very beautiful forms have appeared, the fourth sequence for instance reminds me of music. I am not 100% happy however with the layout of my board, I feel that the third sequence is out-of-place in terms of how it looks from the rest, but the changes that took place were so great that I felt it fitted the concept of the project. Perhaps it would have been better placed as the last set of images instead of in the middle as it is, it feels too dominant due to the large amount of white.

DSDN142 Creative Coding: Images

These images were generated by changing the angle, scale, height and width values in a random order.

DSDN142 Creative Coding: Sequence 1

This is the set of form experimentation snapshots that sequence one of the board comes from.