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Learning from Feedback
As the head chef of a new 5-Star restaurant, you are anxiously preparing for the opening in three months. Your menu is mostly set, and you’ve talked about your ideas with your food industry friends and they’re excited. You want to try out some of your dishes on people who aren’t in the industry, so…
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Manually Clustering 275 Images For Qualitative Analysis
Grounded Theory is a technique for developing a theory about some empirical data you collected. This is in opposition to having some hypotheses in advance, which you will either verify or not. However, if you’re collecting data in an entirely new field, you might not know what hypotheses are important, and the hypotheses you have…
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User Groups and Their Needs
For the course I’m TAing this semester, CSC318: The Design of Interactive Computational Media, the main group project is to develop a contacts/address book application. Part of the design process we get the students to go about is to think of a specific user group and then go do interviews, questionnaires and other investigations to…
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The State of Kinect Gaming
I’ve played almost every Kinect game available, and I have to admit, most of them aren’t very good. There are a few exceptions, which I’ll get to below. The “controller-less” aspect of the Kinect was what brought it so much initial excitement. However, we’re still not good at designing experiences that take advantage of this.…
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Kinect Body Paint – Kinect Workshop @ Pervasive 2012
Look at what I and my team made in a couple hours at the Kinect Workshop (run by David Kim): There are “buckets” of paint on either side of the space. One can grab paint and draw it all over your body and your friends! Only two people can play at a time. “Sorry”. Download…
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Augmenting Minimalism (Improv)
Improv (when I’m loving it) is the most minimalist art form. Improv tends to be better when we bring only a little bit of ourselves to it; when we plan as little in advance as possible. The best, most honest, improv moments are when you stare across the empty void space of the stage into…
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Interview on CBC’s Spark Radio Show
I was interviewed about my current research work by Norah Young for CBC’s Radio show Spark. The project I talked about was Scribbling with Typeset. Here’s a video of the work in action: This work is part of a larger ongoing project on understanding how people use paper. Now, to run some more studies… Here’s…
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Scribbling with Typeset
Typeset text via keyboard text input is still mostly confined to rigid, linear textboxes, while freeform written text from a stylus or pen and paper is slower and harder to read and re-use in new contexts. I created a prototype on the Microsoft Surface that combined the best properties of both of these worlds: quick,…
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This is What A Day of Gesture Design Looks Like
After spending a day designing a gesture detection algorithm, I took a look down at my paper and noticed that it looked almost art-like, if you didn’t know the origin. I decided to humbly share them with you for your educational and aesthetic benefit, my dear readers.
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Above The Surface Interaction
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. – Thomas Edison This past year, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to work on several projects that did not go anywhere. I would started getting discouraged when it was clear a project was not going to arrange itself into a nice academic paper-sized…