Hard hard user interfaces.

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Started as someone doing ActionScript in Macromedia Flash I got into Human-Computer-Interaction after watching Jeff's Hann's multi-touch work. That's the power of a really cool demo that inspired the birth of NUIGroup community which spawned 1000s of makers all around the world making their own projector camera multitouch systems. All of it became mainstream once Apple released the iPhone to the world, and also gave birth to my interest in human-centered engineering. I spent some 10 years after that playing with sensors, haptics, and gestural interfaces through multiple input modalities but nothing stuck as much as multi-touch did. Thanks to Apple's execution. Everyone's phone/tablet interaction is default multitouch. (unless you have a visual impairment). Primsense evolved into Kinect, then came Wiimote, Leap but nothing stuck.  for speech, it was Amazon's Alexa. Latest news , that its going to lose Amazon 10B.  Like I am writing this post through my keyboard a...
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Analysing an autorickshaw ride in Bangalore

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The bumpy ride on the Bangalore streets triggered a thought the other day, why not log the data and analyse it later(whackily purposeless initially). 
The desire to log is esp. a fallout of my recent stint with user studies dealing with data cleaning/analysis and deriving statistical results from it: formally two-way ANOVA tests, T-tests etc. and who doesn't love clean graphs telling a story :-)















Without giving much thought, I tied my Macbook Pro equipped with SuddenMotionSensor(SMS) to the auto-rickshaw seat and used http://www.shiffman.net/p5/sms/ to log the X/Y/Z axis data in CSV format. I manually kept a record through a stopwatch about the potholes/pit occurrence during the 25 minute rick-ride. It was interesting to the see the outliers due to the sudden relative motion triggered jerks.


Ankit and I plotted a few qualitative graphs out of the sampled CSV data(6731 datalogs). I matched the spikes with the manually recorded pothole/sudden-jerk data to see the obvious but visually pleasing results :)
Red color shows the X, Orange shows the Y and Blue shows the Z displacements. 

I dont know the exact use of this approach. Just that cheap accelerometers could be a good way to present the logged data as analytics to the user. Next time I'll commute the same route through a citybus and share my analysis within the same blogpost. :-) If anyone's interested in the raw manual+automatically recorded data, let me know!

Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Comments

  1. UnknownTuesday, June 21, 2011 at 9:45:00 PM GMT+5:30

    Is this sms feature is only in mac. is it an external device or dome software

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  2. touchaddictTuesday, June 21, 2011 at 10:05:00 PM GMT+5:30

    AFAIK, its only on a mac. Its an internal device used to prevent hard-disk damage. Just software can't do that. BTW, a cheap Wiimote or a logger written on a smartphone can also do that. :)

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