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.
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).
Read the manual before using the interface. (Kinect Adventures)
(Yes, it’s a *cute* manual, but these are still instructions to memorize.)
Summary: Inconsistent gestures, invisible commands, overlooked warnings, awkward dialog confirmations. But fun to play.
Kinect is a new video game system that is fully controlled by bodily movements. It’s vaguely similar to the Wii, but doesn’t use a controller (and doesn’t have the associated risk of banging up your living room if you lose your grip on the Wii wand during an aggressive tennis swing).
Some people think that usability is very costly and complex and that user tests should be reserved for the rare web design project with a huge budget and a lavish time schedule. Not true. Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
In earlier research, Tom Landauer and I showed that the number of usability problems found in a usability test with n users is:
N(1-(1-L)n)
where N is the total number of usability problems in the design and L is the proportion of usability problems discovered while testing a single user. The typical value of L is 31%, averaged across a large number of projects we studied. Plotting the curve for L=31% gives the following result:
The most striking truth of the curve is that zero users give zero insights.
The latest release in the Civilization series has many improvements, from beautiful new graphics to redesigned gameplay. Many features in Civilization IV have been streamlined or eliminated, in favor of a simplified playing experience that will attract new players to the game. Having studied Civilization IV extensively (most of our publications are based upon research in Civilization IV), we will discuss some of Civilization V‘s many changes and the associated trade-offs in terms of player engagement and motivation.
Situated learning focuses on learning in situ, in the environment or context for which that knowledge applies. At Situated Research, we focus on examining technology in the actual environment in which it is used, in order to uncover user practices and behaviors that suggest ways in which technology is expected to behave.