Human Computer Interaction - Blog 4

The Human Factor

                So for the past few weeks of lectures, we have been heavily focusing on different types of interfaces and generally talking about human computer interaction. This week, we learned something different, the human factors. Basically it talked all about us, our eyes and ears and our capabilities and limitations. There was a lot of basic knowledge that we already know about humans, such as the fact that we are in fact limited when it comes to our processing capabilities. In our lecture we had learned that an analogy comparing humans to computers was made based on an idea that humans have input and output systems. I would assume this mainly talks about our brains and how we think and process information and result in some kind of output. We have created computers and heavily rely on computers, but we are in fact not computers, and this understanding is something that game designers will have to think about when developing. A lot about understanding the human side of things involves digging further into psychology, something I had not really expected to look into in this field. Our lecture informs us that in order to successfully design interactive systems, we should understand the relationship and be aware of the connection between the field of psychology and technology.

Human Senses

                One important thing that game developers should be knowledgeable about is the human eye and its vision system. This particular area does not really interest me, though I can see how it is important. It was something that I had seen twice now in two different courses. Both of these courses were taught by Dr. Bill Kapralos. In our video lecture things like rods and cones within our vision system were talked about. I specifically remember an example of a person sleeping in a dark room and suddenly opening the blinds to be temporarily blinded. Definitely something that occurs to most individuals almost on a daily basis, this also happens to me sometimes during the winter when I’ve been outside looking at the snow for so long and I suddenly go inside and I see everything dark and kind of green. The first example is a result of the rods in our eyes succumbing to light saturation; you can also not see any colors because of the cones in our eyes. Cones are different because they are less sensitive to lights and instead will intake different wavelengths which allow us to see color. I would assume when an individual is color blind, there is some damage done to the cones in a person’s eye? We did hear about this briefly but my curiosity will probably lead me to further look into it, mainly because I live with a color blind individual. One thing that is true about cones as we learned in our lecture is that they are not necessary for peripheral vision.

                Another extremely important human sense is hearing, and the overall ability for a human to recognize sounds. The ear to me seems like a very complicated system; even in the Sound & Audio class I took a couple years ago I had never fully been able to understand it. One thing that is evident about the human hearing system is that it gives us the basic instinct to gather information about our surrounding environment. Sounds can be heard at different pitches, different distances and volumes. Though we did in fact touch up on this particular sense in the lectures, I am still having a bit of difficulty understanding how the ear actually works.

                Touching things is another human sense, one that has actually greatly contributed to the functionality of the gaming industry today. This is seen also with most of the small devices that exist today such as tablets and smartphones. Instead of touching physical buttons we can now drag and slide and wave our hands all over our gadgets to perform special tasks. We learned in our video lecture that with touch there are three types of receptors. Thermoreceptors can detect different temperatures (hence the word thermo) which help us determine in our everyday lives what is hot and what is cold. Imagine a life where we didn’t have such receptors? We would probably be no better than robots. Without Thermoreceptors, taking a shower would be a lot different since we wouldn’t be able to tell how hot or cold water is that touches us. The next receptor is called the Nociceptor, which can be summarized to represent pain. If a person were to touch and apply pressure to something really sharp they would feel pain, but if we did not have these receptors we could pretty much do anything and not notice whether we are hurt or not. Mechanoreceptors respond mainly to pressure, this can be seen throughout the human body. Different areas of our bodies can be more sensitive than others. These factors would probably vary with different strengths of muscle and bone in different areas. This particular sense interested me a lot because it got me thinking of what makes us human when compared to a robot or artificial intelligence.

Mind & Movement

A lot of the technological interfaces that exist today such as Kinect and the Playstation Move heavily rely on human motor skills to function. Everything we do in life involves us moving, even the simple things like sleeping which involves us being in an unaware state involves movement. Breathing moves our upper body, our mouths move and most people that sleep usually move around and shift for comfort without really knowing. I use this example since it primarily is present in my life. I sometimes find myself on the floor of my room because I would roll off the bed. In our video lecture we learned that movement is measured in two factors, Time and Accuracy. Movement heavily ties in with the human brain as well. We only perform options because we receive information from what we see, do or hear, we process this information and output a result of movement. In video games this is present when we have to react to a situation in a game and press certain buttons. I can more specifically apply this to fighting games, where players must try and understand other players and try to figure out what moves they will make to block. It seems very simple, but now that I think of it, there is a lot of brain processing going on while we are making extremely quick decisions to press buttons and perform certain inputs. What makes the human brain very interesting is that the more we repeat certain tasks we will slowly become better and make these decisions even quicker. The ability to defeat someone in a video game gets easier the more you practice, a very simple concept.

 

Human Memory

                We have learned in depth that there are three branches of our human memory system. It can be broken down to short term, long term and sensory. What does this mean? Sensory information as explained in our video lecture works like a buffer that constantly replaces information. The type of information would be visual, hearing and haptic. Short term memory is something every person goes through almost every moment. We hold information for short periods of time while we discover certain things. These are forms of information that I personally think one of two things generally happen. You will either forget about it completely, or it gets converted into long term memory. The concept of long term memory is quite simple, it is information that we can keep in our heads for a long time. I vision it as a memory that we can recall upon at all times. This is heavily relied on when it comes to education and studying for exams.

We’re Not Perfect!

                One thing that really makes us human is our imperfections. We have things such as mistakes, emotions, forgetting and sometimes medical conditions that effect our senses and even motor skills. Emotion is probably one of the strongest in my opinion, if a person is having a bad day they will often choose not to go about performing certain information processing and even carrying out motor skills. This can also affect memories as sometimes our emotions will attempt to block out what we remember in order to recover from something. From a positive perspective, motivating emotions can improve a human’s overall brain processing and motor skill performance. With these factors effecting humans every day, I think designers should be able to create interfaces that do not wear down the human senses that much. When referring to video games specifically, we tend to want to have fun and visit the settings and set up as little as possible. It is really good that games available today can vary in different cognitive thinking levels. You can have games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age that you can make your own decision in completing storyline quests and you can also have less content heavy games such as the Call of Duty franchise which requires less decision making. Though there are key differences. In the RPG style games your reaction times may be slower because you have to think more long term about what you want to do. The shooter style games you will be making a rapid amount of quick decisions, moving and reacting to different quick actions within a game.