MECHANICAL INTERACTION
Finding ways to help humans mesh with technology
Computers are all around us.
The average person interacts with a computer countless times every day. It happens each time someone uses a smartphone, starts a new car or withdraws cash from an ATM.
A group of researchers at the University of Saskatchewan is dedicated to making these interactions more efficient, safer and in some cases, more fun.
The Interaction Lab doesn’t look futuristic, save for a few nice monitors and touch screens, but the technologies it develops are on the cutting edge.
“Because technology is in so many different things people do, we can look at the ways people use that technology in everything from agriculture to games,” says Carl Gutwin, who founded the facility in 1998.
The lab is dedicated to the academic field of human computer interaction (HCI), a discipline with origins as far back as the Second World War.
“They were trying to design cockpits in complex aircraft and found people were having difficulty with the complex level of automation,” Gutwin says.
In that case, streamlining the relationship between human and computer had life-and-death implications. The field has grown over decades to include all facets of that relationship.
The specific technologies being studied at the Interaction Lab have changed through the years. The last five years have included a lot of work on touchscreens, new media and video games. Lately they have been looking at agricultural applications. Their direction flows with the state of technology and the grants they can attain.
“We’re not tied to a particular domain of application,” Gutwin says.
In all cases, research starts with a problem. How can we make large touchscreens easier to use? Can we empower people with physical disabilities to play video games with their friends and family? Is there a better way for medical practitioners to look at their data?
It hasn’t always been easy. Some areas, particularly video games, haven’t always been considered worth the effort by the academic establishment.
“Six or seven years ago, it was difficult to get papers about games accepted in the academic community,” Gutwin says.
“Telling people we were going to study World of Warcraft would raise a few eyebrows.”
That perspective has shifted. People are starting to realize that discoveries made in one area can have implications throughout the field.
“We’ve realized that, if games are fun, why shouldn’t it be a pleasant experience to use Microsoft Word as well,” Gutwin says.
Regan Mandryk, a senior faculty member at the lab, spends the bulk of her research time on games.
“People spend more money on video games than they spend on music and movies combined, and no one would say that studying music or movies isn’t a serious business,” she says.
Her studies have included work on how to use games to encourage physical fitness, what causes aggressive and toxic behaviour among people online, the cognitive benefits games can offer and more.
Mandryk came to the lab eight years ago, drawn by the work Gutwin had done in the field.
“We’ve been able to, together, grow something impressive here,” she says.
As long as computers keep propagating, and new technologies keep emerging, there are always more problems to solve.
LOOKING AT ALL SIDES OF THE PROBLEM
Ian Stavness, the other faculty member at the lab, is working on new ways to present information in three dimensions.
He and some of his students are building hand-held 3D displays. Picture a cube small enough to hold, with screens on each of the six sides. As a user turns the cube in their hands, the device interprets the movements and gives a 3D view from whatever angle they are looking.
“We show the 3D rendering from the perspective of the person,” Stavness says.
Having built a cube, they are now working on spherical displays.
So far, as the technology is being perfected, the images are innocuous. One demo had two virtual toy cows that tumbled as the cube was rotated. But the idea has more practical applications.
“Almost all of our research is really driven at specific, applied questions,” Stavness says.
Advanced computer imaging could be the future of health care. Many of the scans being done in medicine are already 3D.
“So you can see the inside of your body in 3D, but the doctor or the radiologist will still look at it in 2D, slice-by-slice,” he says.
Once the technology is fully developed, doctors could have a device like this in their office, allowing them to view or show patients a much better representation of what is happening internally.
“Some of these new 3D techniques allow them to see the actual 3D structures of, say, a bone or a heart,” Stavness says.
Mandryk, along with collaborators, is working on a way to make concentration exercises for children suffering from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) more fun.
“Traditionally, they go to a clinic, where they hook them up to all these devices that measure their brain activity and they do all these exercises, and it’s boring,” Mandryk says.
When concentration is the goal, boredom is a problem. Mandryk, along with intern Anke Reinschluessel, are using a video game to combat the problem.
The game is simple. The player’s avatar runs endlessly forward, collecting coins and avoiding obstacles not unlike many games available on smartphones.
The difference comes from a headset the player wears that monitors their brain activity. Children with FASD often need to train themselves to focus. The headset can tell if they are doing so and rewards them with faster movement in the game, and power-ups that let them jump higher or become invincible.
In tests with the software, they found that using this positive reinforcement was effective in helping people train their brains. It’s also more fun, meaning subjects are more motivated to play the game than other exercises.
“Not only was it more enjoyable, it was also more effective,” Mandryk says.
IF THESE WALLS COULD CLICK
Why look at a regular computer monitor when a whole room can be your display? Cody Ede, an intern at the Interaction Lab, is working with Scottish collaborators on a projects called Aspecta.
Currently, you could use a single projector on a single surface like a wall. Aspecta uses a curved mirror, not unlike one you would see in the corner of a convenience store, to spread that image across an entire space.
“We can fill a room and essentially make it a monitor,” Ede says.
Once you tell the software the shape of a room, it can adjust the image so it will bounce off the mirror and fill the room perfectly.
With the concept proven, one of the next steps is making the technology mobile. Using a device like the Microsoft Kinect, which can detect the layout of the room, Aspecta could be taken into any room and set up easily.
“Eventually, what we’ll do is we’ll have a Kinect on a turntable, and you’ll spin it around once to get a perfect 3D model of the room,” Gutwin says.
KEEPING UP WITH YOUR ELITE FRIEND
Rodrigo Vicencio-Moreira loves to play first-person shooter games. The problem comes when he wants to play with a less-experienced friend.
“The weaker player doesn’t have fun because they don’t have any chance, and the stronger player doesn’t have any challenge. No one has a good time,” the PhD student says.
To tackle this problem, VicencioMoreira made an entirely new game designed for players of all skill levels to compete.
It does this by dynamically adjusting how accurate a player needs to be.
As a person falls behind, the margin of error for hitting becomes wider and wider.
Once the game was made, he had people play it and compared it to their experiences with other shooter games.
“What we found in our research is both the weaker and the stronger player had more fun when they were playing the game,” VicencioMoreira says.
A system like this could be integrated into a commercial shooter game, making the experience more enjoyable for casual play.
Vicencio-Moriera hopes to present his project to industry professionals at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
With each problem solved at the Interaction Lab, researchers are improving the way computers work for humanity.
“It eventually comes down to quality of life, money, happiness, these kinds of things,” Gutwin says.
What we found in our research is both the weaker and the stronger player had more fun when they were playing the game.