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Revision as of 19:13, 15 November 2009

Human Computer Interaction

This is the projects main page for cs4hc3 and se4f03 -- HCI / CHI Courses.

Objectives

Logistics

• During the middle of term the class will be divided into about 12 (n) groups, each of whom will negotiate amongst themselves a topic of concentration from the list below with at least three ranked by selected priority. At an early designated lecture, each group will be linked to a topic of their choice in a first-come/first-served basis -- only one group per project.
• Group members should all have their associated member email addresses and use these to generate a wiki in one of the groups member names. Note that ALL changes made to a wiki are logged by IP address of the machine, as well as time and date. By law Derek MUST always be running an audit trail system which essentially operates as a key logger in that if any vandalism is done electronically, he can determine who is logged on, from where as well as what was typed. This is a warning that anyone modifying a group's wiki who is NOT a member of that group will be caught and risk a zero grade for this assignment. Therefore "play safe" and do not fool around. (wfsp)
• Just after several weeks of class duration, a created wiki from each group will be completed and marked.
• Part of this mark will be composed of (n-1) other rankings from each of the other groups, who will rank and provide one sentence of what is best and one sentence of what is worst about the subject wiki under consideration. The ranking for each wiki will be posted anonymously for class consideration and discussion near the end of term.

Topics:

Reference -- adapted from ACM (Association for Computing Machinery -- but people can join, too!) http://wiki.acm.org/cs2001/index.php?title=HUMAN-COMPUTER_INTERACTION

1. Motivation: Why the study of how people interact with technology is vital for the development of most usable and acceptable systems.
2. Contexts for HCI: mobile devices, consumer devices, business applications, web, business applications, collaboration systems, games, etc. (Taken by Group 8 -- wfsp/05nov09@14:00)
3. Process for user-centered development: early focus on users, empirical testing, iterative design. (Specified for Group 11 -- wfsp/15nov09@14:30)
4. Different measures for evaluation: utility, efficiency, learnability, user satisfaction. (Taken by Group 5 -- wfsp/10nov09@13:00)
5. Models that inform human-computer interaction (HCI) design: attention, perception and recognition, movement, and cognition.
6. Social issues influencing HCI design and use: culture, communication, and organizations. (Taken by Group 3 -- wfsp/13nov09@15:30)
7. Accommodating human diversity: including universal design and accessibility and designing for multiple cultural and linguistic contexts. (Taken by Group 9 -- wfsp/12nov09@13:30)
8. The most common interface design mistakes. (Taken by Group 1 -- wfsp/04nov09@17:00)
9. User interface standards. (Taken by Group 6 -- wfsp/05nov09@19:30)
10. The five interaction styles as espoused by B.Scheidermann. (Taken by Group 7 -- wfsp/04nov09@17:30)
11. The Object-Action (or visa-versa) model and its applications. (Specified for Group 2 -- wfsp/15nov09@14:30)
12. The direct manipulation method and its importance to CHI. (Taken by Group 4 -- wfsp/06nov09@09:30)

This is the VRML assignment main page for cs4hc3 and se4f03
-- HCI / CHI Courses.

Some Important References:

• The Custom Courseware for this course has an Appendix section for VRML beginners so this is a good place to begin studying if you are not familiar with the Virtual Reality Modelling Language. We will be using this to create 3-D interfaces for 3-D worlds, just to get some practice in thinking in more than two dimensions. Although VRML has been around for more than a decade, it is still found as the 3-D layer in MPEG4, has been updated and in a standard in the W3C world known as X3D, which is just VRML with <elements> instead of reserved keywords. If you know VRML, you know X3D.
• To begin our study of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), we need to get setup to view the VRML code (which is in pure ASCII, as is Javascript, etc.) To create VRML, use any ASCII editor that you like best. I use Crimson Editor which has a built-in context sensitive markup that understands VRML, so it is easy to distinguish comments from verbs and nouns, etc. Go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/emeraldeditor/files/ where Emerald Editor (the newest version of the Crimson editor) can be downloaded freely. To interpret VRML code (nested in HTML code) you need a plug-in. The best that I have found is called Cortona from Parallel Graphics at http://www.cortona3d.com/cortona/ . It works best with Apple Safari Browser version 4 from http://www.apple.com/safari/download/ . All of this information is at the end of the course web site section on VRML at http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~se4d03/demo.html#VRML headed with the title "Recommended Client Applications". By the way, Parallel Graphics has an editor called VRMLPad that is not free but can be downloaded as a trial version, which may help the beginner as it provides a thumbnail sketch at the margin right when it recognizes any VRML code shape primitives -- interesting thing to see work.
• As far as web references go, the best place to start is on the course web site:
  -- http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~se4d03/demo.html#VRML
1. Once here you can take the tutorial, done by a senior thesis student Polo Cerone several year's ago. It can be taken on-line or downloaded and worked through locally -- either is equivalent.
2. Once the tutorial is taken, there are many example VRML code snippets that can be viewed with whatever browser plug-in that you have installed. Pay particular attention to the graduated examples that show how one specifically goes about creating an interface in VRML that controls objects in the main scene graph. This is located back near the beginning of the VRML section titled "Graduated VRML2 Interface Examples".