(Article Summary) Media Studies, Mobile Augmented Reality, and Interaction Design

The mobile augmented reality is the new technology that integrates the real-world with digital information, for example, the augmented reality trail guide application described in this article which offers two views, one with the already known Google style map view that shows points of interest over the surface of the map, and a second view that appears when the phone is turned up and displays information about the points of interest floating in the space of the real view in that point of time.

This article examines how the humanistic disciplines of media studies are related with this new digital media interaction design. Media studies aim is to understand the role and influence of the traditional media (Film, Television, Radio and print) in our culture. Some media studies approach digital media only from the analytical perspective, which differs from the practice in HCI, therefore it is important to find a balance between these two angles. Then the question again is which aspects of the theory collected on previous traditional media studies can help to design these new media technologies. One can be the history. The history can helps us understand how people perceive things, for example, why something is aesthetical pleasing or not, and we can integrate that knowledge with new forms of media and create new types of relations with the environment through the use of technology, like the example of the AR trail guide where the user has the map view which requires us to understand concepts like how the map is oriented, or the symbols that are used to represent specific location, etc. on the contrary, the AR view give us an immediate understanding of our visual field where the symbols are only the markers that float with additional information of the objects in the visual scene making this experience aesthetically different. Another media component that is not well know is the Panorama. New mobile applications allow to take multiples exposures rotating the phone and stich them together using some software to create panoramic projections. These Panoramic projections are being used to create enhanced user experiences, for example the application tourWrist, allows you to see the panorama as if you were taking a picture, using your wrist, which gives the user a totally different experience compared with the traditional 360 view where you have to use you mouse or your fingers.

These AR Panoramic experiences are considered as polyaesthetic in two ways, one is a combination of senses (sound, sight and touch) and the other one is that we see ourselves here and there, we see our physical surrounding beyond the phone and we see another world in the screen where we can also move it around.  This polyaesthetic concept can be extended to the digital design as well.

In summary the blend of immerse experiences and multiple panoramas is still a relatively unexplored field for aesthetic design that could offer new interactions for the user with the technology; also the use of historical media studies perspective can help to integrate and understand our current cultural environment to identify aspects that contribute with the improvement of digital and interaction design experiences.

Reference:

Bolter, Maria Engberg, and Blair MacIntyre. 2013. Media studies, mobile augmented reality, and interaction design. interactions 20, 1 (January 2013), 36-45.DOI=10.1145/2405716.2405726 

#6 Embedded Application Automotive Industry.

My brother is looking for a new car, and I am helping him with his search. I have to admit that each time when I am looking at cars I get more and more impressed because car are really becoming complex interactive systems.

I was looking for the new Honda accord 2014 which is considered as an affordable car and I have to say that it is really amazing what features the cars have on these days.

Besides the security features that have been around for while (e.g. the body structure design, anti-lock braking system-ABS Dual-Stage, Multiple-Threshold Front Airbags – SRS) I saw several functionalities that I found interesting. The first one was the forward collision warning, which using a camera and radar system can detect the presence of vehicles in front of the car, and when the system calculate that the car is at risk alerts the driver. Another feature in the car is that it also provides a lane departure warning, which can detect when the driver is changing lines without using the turn signal light, assuming that this is an unintended line change it alerts the driver. It also provides what they call the Honda Lane Watch; it is a small camera on the passenger side that is activated automatically when the driver signal right and it displays live video on the screen improving the visibility.

Definitely vehicles are an important representation of useful and attractive user interfaces with technologies in several areas including driving control, assisted functions, navigation, information services, etc., that assist the user in the daily  driving experience.

#5. CBS application mobile experience.

I don’t really watch too much tv, the only two TV shows that I like to watch on a regular basis are big bang theory and how I met your mother, both of them are produced by CBS. But with my daily routine where I have to do homework, and my full time job, watching those series in the hours where they are transmitted is most of the times impossible to me.

I know that I can pay for the TV shows, but to be honest, even though I enjoy them, it is not worth it to spend that money on the shows, at least not for now that I have other priorities on my list. I found that CBS has an application for the iPhone and the iPad, which I use some times to watch the shows but this app has a lot failures and In my opinion the user experience that provides is not good enough.

First in the mobile application they transmit the episodes 8 days after the air date, but they have them the next day on the CBS website; I really don’t understand why they don’t do the same for the mobile app.

Second, the closed caption is never synchronized with the video and the font is pretty small, which for me sometimes is annoying, they have a feature that simply doesn’t work. 

Third, reliability, with the new version on the IOS 7 the application had many crashes, the screen got freezed and it was very difficult to watch an episode, but later with the updates they improved a little bit this part.

Finally I think they can improve the user interface, in the home screen they display a long list with some shows, I think the content could be better distributed in the home screen, my suggestion is if they want to keep that list on the home screen they could add a search field in order to facilitate the search of the shows. As well, they definitely need to improve the closed caption option and transmit the show next day after the aired day just like in the website, and improve the quality of the video transmission.

Web Development for mobile devices.

The web development has been experimenting dramatic changes with the evolution of mobile devices and the increasing network speed connections.  With all the constant improvements in device capacity and connectivity, web developments have started to use more resources making them larger, and this works really good and improves the user experience in regular home wireless or wired connections, on the contrary, cellular networks, which haven’t reached yet the speed of wired networks, experiment slower connections making those larger web developments, in some cases, an annoying experience for the mobile users.

The problems in the mobile device using cellular networks are:

Latency represents the delay between the request and the response. And there is a big difference between the latency in wired and wireless networks, usually wired connections travel more directly and the latency depends on fewer factors than wireless networks.

Web performance, there are techniques that can be used to improve the performance of the website, like reducing the amount of http requests, eliminating images and avoiding redirects.

Mobile device limitations, there is a very wide range of mobile devices in the market with different characteristics, screen sizes, etc. but most of them have lower capabilities than desktops or laptops, therefore it is important to recognize those differences to provide a better user experience. First, the processor capabilities, mobile devices are very powerful in these days, but still not enough, the use of JavaScript is expensive in terms of CPU processing and can make the application slower and drain the battery more quickly. Therefore, the suggestion is to try to avoid its usage if it is possible, in web mobile developments specifically in cases like animations where CSS is much more efficient.

Next limitation is memory capacity. Mobile devices have considerably less memory than desktops and laptops. Web applications that consume too much memory in mobile devices can make the browser slower, unresponsive or crash.  Normally the biggest problem are the images, in a desktop application, usually the images are loaded in the DOM (document object model), even if they are not visible on the screen, but with the memory capabilities of the desktop this is not a problem and the web application can run smoothly. But in the case of a mobile device, it can crash the application, then it is necessary to remove the images from the DOM that are not longer needed in order to avoid the unnecessary consumption of memory.

In my opinion, for web development there is no way to create one hundred percent universal applications that are able to provide good user experience among different types of devices. In the design of each application it is important to identify the target devices audience, and make the design based on the characteristics of each device target, if it is a desktop, probably the web mobile application can contain richer elements than a phone version. It is even necessary to differentiate the phone and the tablet web developments.

Reference:

Zakas, N (2013). The Evolution of Web Development for Mobile Devices. Queue 11, 2, pages 30 (February 2013), 10 pages. DOI=10.1145/2436696.2441756