cui_spring2021

Week 14 - Creating User Interfaces

Overview

• Speculative Interface examples
• check-in: in-progress demos of final project

Paper Signals

Paper Signals

Paper Signals is an experiment that explores how physical things can be controlled with voice. –source: Experiments with Google

Project Oasis

Project Oasis is a self-sustaining plant ecosystem that reflects outside weather patterns by creating clouds, rain, and light inside a box. You can talk to it using the Google Assistant and ask it to create certain conditions or show you the weather in a specific place. This experiment expands our conversation with technology and the natural world.

link

video

Project Conjure

A recent focus of our lab has been making use of Tangible Displays and Body Object Space to develop new assistive technologies. As a test case, we prototyped the Mario side-scrolling game for visually impaired users, using body movement analogies to control Mario in the game.

–Kallirroi Retzepi at MIT Media Lab

link

What’s America Listening To?

• link

We built an immersive talk radio experience, where you can fly over America and select talk-radio stations to listen to live. The experience gives you an astronaut’s view of the Earth, while at the same time allowing you to be immersed in multiple channels of talk-radio. While listening to stations, we realized that there were many subjects that were heavily discussed in talk-radio shows which we had never heard of. We also overlayed information about congressional districts and how they voted in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 election. By selecting a station, you could also see who the congress-people for that district are.

Click Here

ClickHere is a Chrome plugin that automatically transforms a web page to an abstract attentional tapestry. The project takes on an interface critique standpoint by asking the following questions: how do our habitual online spaces transform themselves when reduced to only a few building blocks? More specifically, what does a browser window look like when all attention-hungry elements are emphasized?

available in the Chrome Extensions - chrome web store

code

– Kallirroi Retzepi

Resources

• Pose Recognition tutorial - link

Queering Our Interfaces: Push-Notifications Expressing Promiscuity

by Elena Lee Gold

• Prototypes - video –starting at 18:30

Brain-Computer Interfaces

by Sean Montgomery (Founder EmotiBit), Conor Russomanno (CEO and Co-Founder Open BCI), Heidi Boisvert (Director of Emerging Media Technology at CUNY), Guillermo Bernal (MIT Media Lab, Fluid Interfaces)

• Panel - video

Electrical and chemical signals are constantly traveling throughout our brains and bodies, carrying sensations, thoughts, emotions and our reactions to the world around us. Studying these signals and how they are altered by external stimuli and internal contexts gives us a window into ourselves and how we can enhance our health, well-being, and capabilities in the 21st century. Using open-source tools like Processing, EmotiBit, and OpenBCI and XTH we will discuss how sensing signals from the body can be used in research, education, art, DIY projects and, perhaps, to alter the future of human cognition.

This wednesday: In-progress check-ins

Demonstration of working speculative interfaces.

We will meet in small groups to give feedback.

Final deliverables due Wednesday May 12 at 2:30pm

1. Title
2. Concept Description of the interface
3. Practical description of how it works
4. Video OR images with text captions demonstrating a step-by-step walkthrough of your interface