| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| creating the illusion of tactility |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription |
Jan Willem Huisman |
Wow, here I am live on stage at the Doors. This is My Moment! When I was a student I’ve been here several times and the stage seemed so far away. And now in such a short notice, I’m here on stage. And I think the best way to share this with you is to come up with an interesting and maybe an understandable story. And another thing is the presentation I’m about to give has everything to do with illusion. So what we’re trying to do is to create the illusion of tactility on the screen. Here I hold my hand on a piece of plastic that we use to communicate with one of the most complex machines of this age. It’s a small device used as an extension of our hand in a digital world. When it’s meant to be an extension, why do we use only such a small portion of its functionality by just pointing, dragging and clicking. Because if you take some time to think about the functionality of your hand, you know that one of its major functionalities is to touch and to feel. Maybe we should all take some time and feel our knee, or the one of our neighbour. For those of you who don’t really dare, we all remember when we were small kids that we had to burn our fingers to the stove before we could understand the sensation of heat. As we learned then, feeling is a very intense way. Why don’t we try to add tactility to the mouse? Difficult you say, we need more and faster technology to do so. But are those new input devices the answer to adding tactility to your interface? Maybe but what we do now will use a thirty dollar piece of equipment, and with some magic and cheap tricks I will show you how we try to create the illusion of tactility. The same way as you trick your brain with small and funny experiments of visual delusion as we just saw in the presentation of Barbara Stafford, you can also trick the brain to feel tactility. What you need is behaviour on your screen that simulates real life. But how do we transform this into a tactile experience? You’ll need to combine the physical rules like gravity and torsion with the input of the user. Implementing these rules however means that all elements in your interface need to support this behaviour. I think we need to show an example how this theoretical statement comes to life. I must say I’m aware that showing you tactility is almost the same as trying to let you smell the colour red. I show you how we try to make an object that looks and feels like a pogo stick. And for everyone here who speaks English as well as I do, I’ll try to explain how a pogo stick works. It’s a long stick. Underneath is a spring, You step on it and you go like ... if you’re really handy with it you can get higher and higher. First we need some rules to define such an object. In this case its compression results in decompression. This means that the input of the user is compression, and this will result in the object as decompression. And we also need gravity, otherwise we have only one big jump and will never come back to earth. Okay let’s see what happens if we play with the rules. Video please. We implemented the rules that this may be moving but it’s far from feeling. If we had some sound we can create the illusion of control. If sound supports the movement of the mouse, the user will try to find a logical relation between action and feedback. This relation will be based on his personal, mental picture of the situation. His only clues in this case are the movement of the mouse and sound. So let’s see and hear what happens. As you can hear sound is a very important condition for the illusion of tactility. The user connects a relation between his action and some kind of performance in the program. His mental picture gets an outline. But we can do better. What happens if we had some visual? As you can see, the compression with the mouse results in decompression in the element. If the design is consistent, the visual feedback and the sound create and support the same illusion. The mental picture is almost complete. But does it move or does it jump up and down? We need an environment where the defined characteristics can reveal themselves. Now the image is complete. Now you have the feeling of jumping on a pogo stick. This does not mean that controlling the object is easy. You will have to find a rhythm between compression and decompression. But when you find the balance you can jump higher and higher, just like real life. The object we just presented is part of a project we do in co-operation with VPRO television, and is mentioned in the If/then magazine. The project tries to link the Internet to the television and is called Typotoons. If you want to read something about it, it’s there in the If/then magazine. As you have just seen, creating tactile delusion is easy. Still there’s some conditions to support the success of this small piece of magic. I will try to explain three of these conditions. First you need a medium that’s fast enough for direct feedback. If the program reacts too slow to the input of the user, the illusion is gone. Internet is a medium that struggles with this condition. It’s very difficult to create tactile delusion on the Internet. Second, you need the freedom of movement. A mouse gives you this freedom. It’s much more difficult to simulate the feeling of throwing a ball with a joystick than with your mouse. Third, there’s recognition and expectation. The user must recognise the rules that you implemented in your object. And when they understand these rules, they must always live up to his expectations. In short if the object does not behave the way the user expects, there’s no tactile delusion. After this short brainwork it’s time for a little play. We would like to show you the way we put tactility into the games we design. I would like to show you Master of Elements. It’s an entertainment title for kids aged 8-13. And it’s a game where playing supports learning. We just entered the Room of Gravity; as you can see everything is floating around. Also here we need to implement some rules. Let’s activate gravity and see what happens. This is also a good spot to show how we try to be consistent in the way we use the rules of physics. The ball in this room reacts like a real ball, it bounces but it also gets affected when it touches the ground. When people play with this small animation sequence, there’s no doubt, this is a ball. Another example of tactile delusion is the small plane in the corner. It’s a plane with a rubber band in it, so you can wind it. In order to do so, you have to make a circle with your mouse, but when you stop moving, the rubber will unwind itself. These simple rules can create such an illusion, that the user starts to apply extra force with his hand to completely wind the rubber and the plane. And last but not least, we’d like to show you an example where a few simple rules and some animations can create a tactile delusion strong enough to give you the feeling of real life. In this case, clicking means grabbing and if you let go of your mouse, you let go of the stick. If you make a movement to the left and you let go at the right moment, you’re throwing a pin - just like real life. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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