Essay

Authorship & Interaction Essay
Select one interactive designed environment and critically analyse how information is generated and disseminated in this instance. Use a selection of examples of practice and theory to help you to achieve this.

There are a lot of key factors to understand with interaction design and how it can enable a pleasurable end user experience. Usability, Accessibility and human computer interaction. Usability is the content in which the interface can be used to achieve specific goals with satisfactory effectiveness with specified context of use. Accessibility of a interaction system is to make sure its use, understanding and reach with ease. In relation to the interaction environmental experience it can be related to the overall accuracy of the information and features. Human computer interaction is one of the main component’s to the user experience because human computer interaction is all about the relationship between people and computers. As Jerek Krajewki from university of Wuppertal says “Attention to human-machine interaction is important, because poorly designed human-machine interfaces can lead to many unexpected problems.” Therefore without human computer interaction user experience can not be produced or designed, It has to be incorporated into the design. The most successful interaction design environments are the ones in which the user does not need to have any skills to play or interact with the environment.

In response to the question i will be looking at the Xbox Kinects and how the Kinects works and the positives and negatives of this interactive environment. The Kinects is a motion sensing input device by Microsoft for the xbox 360 and xbox one video game console. And also can be used for windows PC’s. Based around a webcam style add on for the Xbox console’s, it allows users to control and interact with the Xbox console without the need to touch a controller. Through a NUI using gestures and spoken commands. The Xbox Kinects works by using an infrared projector and camera. There is also a special microchip to track the movement of objects and in individuals in three dimensions. Also the device features an RGB camera, depth sensor and a microphone. With the Xbox Kinects its full body gaming. The kinects responds to your movements, you can kick, jump and wave. You use your voice through the microphone to interact with the Xbox Kinects for added entertainment. This will essentially mean that you don’t need a controller to play games, switch to TV with voice control and also play, pause and stop films.

How is the information being generated and disseminated with the Kinects? The user interface of the Xbox Kinects plays a big part in teaching the audience to use Xbox Kinects to make it more natural and easy to navigate through the system. And thats how the Kinects has catered for the world wide audience.The user experience is central to interaction design. Meaning how a product behaves and is used by people in the real world. As stressed by Garrett (2010, p. 10). So the design of the Kinects interface is natural. The user interface is effectively invisible but you can ask the Xbox for help if needed. “Gestural systems are no different from any other form of interaction. They need to follow the basic rules of interaction design, which means well-defined modes of expression, a clear conceptual model of the way they interact with the system, their consequences, and means of navigating unintended consequences. As a result, means of providing feedback, explicit hints as to possible actions, and guides for how they are to be conducted are required. Because gestures are unconstrained, they are apt to be performed in an ambiguous or uninterruptible manner, in which case constructive feedback is required to allow the person to learn the appropriate manner of performance and to understand what was wrong with their action. As with all systems, some undo mechanism will be required in situations where unintended actions or interpretations of gestures create undesirable states. And because gesturing is a natural, automatic behavior, the system has to be tuned to avoid false responses to movements that were not intended to be system inputs. Solving this problem might accidentally cause more misses, movements that were intended to be interpreted, but were not. Neither of these situations is common with keyboard, touchpad, pens, or mouse actions.” Donald Normal ‘NUI‘. This point is important when it comes to gestural systems like the Xbox Kinects. The problem with the Kinects in this instance is that when voice control is on and you tell the Kinects a command there are no consequences so as a result the Kinects does not do anything. This make’s the user frustrated with the system and find’s themselves repeating the command. So the voice recognition isn't great, therefore the voice recognition needs room for improvement. But the positive side of the command being ignored is that it doesn't mistake that command for something else, making it more frustrating for the user.
There are six common navigation gestures that are used with the Xbox Kinects. That sounds like a lot to remember and get familiar with but, The main gesture in which you need is just to put your hand up and wave. Very simple it will then just activate the Kinects. To learn the other gestures you simply say ‘xbox, help’ on the home screen and will bring you up tutorials and how to videos on how to use these six gestures. These videos will be in different languages so it will teach the audience from other countries to use these gestures and get familiar with the system. “The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction” (2006 Page 1) Laws of simplicity by John Maeda. This is what Microsoft has achieved by incorporating simple gesture and voice commands to make it easy for the user to navigate through the system.

The Xbox Kinects uses gestural interaction to get the audience involved in playing games. So the Xbox Kinects is used as a controller and what you do will affect the way the game is played. It also controls your TV so you can use the Xbox Kinects not only to interact with your games but also your entertainment devices. Its what the CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer says, “I believe we will look back on 2010 as the year we expanded beyond the mouse and keyboard and started incorporating more natural forms of interaction such as touch, speech, gestures, handwriting, and vision. What computer scientists call the NUI or natural user interface”. This statement is true. We are starting to use touch, gestures and speech with our smart phone. Why cant we do this with TV’s or computer games. However what makes Xbox Kinects “natural”?. Classing Xbox Kinects as a natural interactive environment could be misused because as said in this article “The concept of natural interaction has been variously defined and misused. In general it refers to the exploitation of natural (i.e. intuitive, familiar, innate, universal, cross-cultural, etc.) skills or abilities for controlling, either implicitly or explicitly, a computer system.” Natural interaction computer graphics applications, The Eurographics Association 2010. But with the Kinect is an interactive environment that behaves with human activities like gestures, head movements, body movements, natural spoken language and even facial expressions. And tackles the problems of cross culture also the kinects is universal. But calling it natural is misused because to use the kinects you still have to learn to use it so for me its not natural.

The Xbox Kinects is commercially developed to be cross-cultural. So there is going to be this cultural divide with using gestures. Because in different cultures they use different gestures for example if a westerner travels to a eastern country or any other country in that manner the gestures used are going to be different. Few are going to be natural or subject to fast or easy learning. When i went to South Africa there was about 10 different handshakes and if i do a handshake i would use in England they would take offense and think that i am trying to intimidate them. But what the Xbox Kinects has achieved is creating this interactive environment to be used around the world. Additionally with the xbox kinects gestures system you can now add your own gestures so if a gesture is not there which is natural to the user it will add that gesture.

The gesture system with the Xbox Kinects is brilliant. There is also a help option to find out what the gestures are incase the user gets stuck. When navigating around i was using one hand and waving it about to go through the system. Also using the voice command which was very useful. As soon as i enter the room all i have say is xbox on and it will turn on automatically. You don’t have to repeat yourself and the voice controls are very responsive and effective. It makes the gaming experience easy and effortless. You don’t need a controller at all to navigate through the system. All that is needed to do simple gestures and simple voice commands like next or play game. However the only downside to the Kinects is that you need a lot of space for the kiencts to work and to get the most out of the system. But saying that, the xbox can detect a player's heart rate, facial expression, 25 individual joints (even thumbs) and the precise rotation of such joints, the weight put on each limb, and the speed of your movements, and track gestures performed with a standard controller.

The Xbox Kinects is different to other interactive environments. The system has its pros and cons but compared to other interactive environments. For example the Rain Room at the Barbican created by Random International in 2012 is an interactive environment, Where rain falls and the user is then able to walk through the rain without getting wet. And allowing the user to experience how it might feel to control the rain. And the carefully choreographed downpour responds to the movements and presence of the user. This technology is cutting edge and the sensors are remarkably responsive and you will never get wet. Compared to the Xbox Kinects the sensory system is not as responsive as that of the rain room. The problems with the Kinects is that it is difficult to pick up your movements and the game on screen does not respond to your movements completely. Thats the difference compared to the rain room is that, It completely responds to your movements its flawless. If you run, It will follow and you will not get wet. On the other hand with the Kinects it has been created for commercial use rather than a one off interactive environment. So the Kinects is not going to be flawless with the sensors because of cost and time. “The Xbox One's improved Kinect device is looking like an enormous leap ahead of its predecessor, but getting it there wasn't easy.” TechNet (Microsoft). The new and improved Kinects is a lot more responsive, it can also pick up 25 individual body parts including thumbs so there has been a significant improvement compared to the old model which had only 14.
Overall as an interactive environment built for commercial use it is a clever machine with some positive points and negative points. Being commercially developed its not going to be perfect for example the voice commands are not as responsive as it should be. Just like the Barbican Rain Room that interactive environment is flawless. But of course the Xbox Kinect is built to be in the users house to have there on interactive environment rather than just having one off interactive environment like the Barbican Rain Room. The gesture side of the Xbox Kinects is admirable with its option of adding gestures and showing you tutorial videos on how to use the Kinects if you get stuck. So these videos are in different languages so this defeats the problem of cross-culture divide. This is a positive, it is universal. The NUI is satisfactory with the feel of the interface feeling natural

(* Additionally Microsoft has also given the kinects to developers in different sectors like mental health, Hospitals and also as a 3D development techniques. But this is only with the new kinects. Before this the kinects was not open source and hackers would hack the kinects to do different activities. Its whats said in this article from newsscientists.com “A few of the purchasers had no plans to use it for its intended purpose. For months they had been drooling over the technology in the device, which includes a sophisticated depth-sensing camera and infrared scanner.” With the technology which is in the xbox kinects not only will it be used to play games and play TV. It will also be possible to scan objects and put them into the digital world. Also the new device lets surgeons consult medical images during an operation without having to scrub out. “Manipulating medical images directly with gestures and voice commands doesn't just leave the surgeon free to concentrate on the task at hand, says Calvin Law, chief of surgery at Sunny Brook hospital in Toronto, Canada. It also frees up their memory. Law has completed a study of how surgeons used his Kinect-based medical-image viewer.” So the machine makes life easier. Using the machine to save lives is remarkable. I could delete this and the word count will be 2000 words or should i just include it ? not too sure if i should add this).

However where the balance of simlicity and comlexity does the Kinects solve the problem and makes using the Xbox and entertainment system< maybe add this at the end explaing that the system makes life simple but there are problems with the voice commands e.g the repeat of the voice commands but its not all doom and gloom talk about that it does make the system easier becuase you dont have to pick up the controller to do the that function.