alyssa l.

The "new" medium is not AR or VR. It's space. It's been around for a long time, and many disciplines, like dance & architecture, have well established methods for turning it into powerful experiences. It's computing that just figured out how to access it. That's what's new. -- Andreea lon Cojocaru

Does the virtual world need to be 3d?

Or

Is the virtual world only in 3d (as in one uniform dimension)?

So the interface between the physical world and the virtual world will have a bit of overlap coming from both worlds... more commonly a digital reconstruction of the physical part. Need not be complex, just enough for alignment.

Until the 2010s, new tech seemed to be about enabling humans: ideas to celebrate. Now, with AI, synthetic biology etc, many techno-optimists are describing a dehumanised future that makes most of us pawns in someone else’s game. I think the first option is still there, but we have to make it so.

New post on how to do real-time diffuse global illumination using surfels and #WebGPU: juretriglav.si/surfel-based... #threejs

Affordance - Wikipedia

Affordance

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill... It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.

James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afforda...

Rethinking HCI Education for the Era of AI

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Four challenges:
- Respond to the changing fundaments of interaction
- Focus teaching on time-enduring principles
- Introduce HCI as an applied science
- Embrace integrative concepts for interdisciplinarity

Unreal Engine 5 is not just a performance problem, it is a UX problem The current debate

Unreal Engine 5 is not just a performance problem, it is a UX problem

medium.com/@raphaelhori...

Creating a (near-)realistic digital world and creating something digitally that can be realized in the physical world are two very very different things.

Bertrand paradox: consider an equilateral triangle that is inscribed in a circle. Suppose a chord of the circle is chosen at random. What is the probability that the chord is longer than a side of the triangle?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertran...

Thinking about the "workable" space:
- screen: 2D with a clear set of boundaries + potential infinite depth inwards
- VR: 3D
- AR: the environment that can be augmented onto. So the visible surface of the 3D space projected to 2D?

HABA-MABA principle (humans are better at - machines are better at)
Paul Fitts 1951

ambient computing?

YouTube video by Dynamicland Computational Public Space

Computational Public Space. A talk about a values-driven approach to integrating computation into cities. (40 min)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PixP...

Duane Bray: three categories of interaction design
- screen-based experiences: pixel-based experiences
- interactive products: if no screen, relies on ambient feedback, using light, sound, or movement
- services: blurrs the boundaries between interaction design and organizational psychology

Prototypes are representations of a design made before final artifacts exist... created to inform both design process and design decisions.. range from sketchess and different kinds of models at various levels - "look like," "behaves like," "works like".

Experience Prototyping: Marion Buchenau and Jane Fulton Suri
three types of prototyping techniques:
- to understand existing user experiences and context
- to explore and evaluate design ideas
- to communicate ideas to an audience

Language is convincing.
Seeing is believing.
Touching is reality.

Alan Kay

Broader definition of interactive design: the design of everything that is both digital and interactive. It includes everyone who has the knowledge and tools that allow them to "create or contrive for a particular purpose or effect" in this digital context.

... the aesthetics, subjective and qualitative values, and human factors.

Narrow definition of interaction design: the design of the subjective and qualitative aspects of everything that is both digital and interactive, creating designs that are useful, desirable, and accessible... the first concern of the designer is the values of the people who will use the design ...

A hierarchy of complexity

... in response to new kinds of constraints, but design problems are changing all the time.

Designers are both enabled and controlled by the constraints that they learn about and come to understand; they are fluent with their tacit knowledge, in their own media, and in the contexts that they are familiar with and understand. This makes it difficult to develop a new design discipline ...

Good design comes from the successful synthesis of a solution that recognizes all the relevant constraints, and the nature of the constraints defines the difference between design disciplines.

People and prototypes

To "understand people and use prototypes for speed" is a good pragmatic summary of a way of answering a "how?" question, but it does not answer questions of what, why, or where.

"... would start from the needs and desires of the people who use a product or service..." - Bill Moggridge, 1980s on interaction design.

"... where one could design behaviors, animations, and sounds as well as shapes. This would be the equivalent of industrial design but in software rather than three-dimensional objects. Like industrial design, the discipline would be concerned with subjective and qualitative values ..."

"... prototyped. This approach tended to generate incremental improvements to the designs but did not encourage more radical innovation. I felt that there was an opportunity to create a new design discipline, dedicated to creating imaginative and attractive solutions in a virtual world ..."