Research Paper

Human/Computer Interaction

By
Robert Schooley

Business Finance 320
Rick Powell
Columbia College

Human/Computer Interaction

This paper should provide an overview of human-computer interaction. It is interesting

the methods humans have been using to interact with computers, and the relationship has been on

a long journey. This journey has not ended however, in fact, it continues as new designs of

computers utilize new technologies. New computer systems manifest on the market ever

growing, every day, and the research of the human/computer interaction has been a rapid

growing field in last twenty years. The development of adaptive interfaces instead of command

and action-based ones was a big enough breakthrough. However, the active interfaces instead of

the passive ones, is a major step forward.

The growth in the field of human/computer interaction has been related to the quality of

the interaction as well as the different branching areas experienced in its history. Rather than just

designing normal interfaces, in the past the differing researching branches often had multiple

focuses concerning the concepts relating to multimodality. This multimodality comprises an

inter-disciplinary attitude which understands the communication and the representation is not

just about language. For the last ten years it was developed to answer the questions, and address

the much debated changes the society undergoes. For example, as it relates to new technologies

in the current media. Multimodal concepts have provided methods, as well as, a solid framework

to the collecting of and the analysis of what is audible, visual, spatial, and embodied feature of

the interactions and the environments as it is related between them.

Defining what Human/Computer interaction is sometimes referred to Man/Machine

Interaction and sometimes interfacing is used rather than interaction. The idea about

Human/Computer Interaction or Interfacing usually focused around the emerging of the

computer, or generally the machine itself. The reason for this is clear, in fact, most computers,

even if they are sophisticated, are relatively worthless without being used correctly by people

who can operate them. This basic premise puts the main arguments into simple terms of what

should be the considerations relating to the Human/Computer Interaction design, as it relates to

usability and functionality. Why and how a system is literally designed can ultimately and often

be defined by the functions the system is capable of doing. How are these functions of the system

helpful towards achieving the purpose of the system? A system’s functionality can be defined

from the set of actions, or sometimes services which it provides its users. The value that comes

from the functionality of the computer is obvious, only if it is efficiently operated by its user.

The usability of a system that has a certain functionality is the degree and range in which

a system can be utilized efficiently and properly to accomplish the goals of the user. Measuring

the actual effectiveness achieved by a system can be accomplished if there is a correct balance

between a system’s usability and functionality. With these concepts in consideration, and

keeping in mind the words computer, system and machines are many times used as synonyms

and are often interchanged. Human/Computer is a design which should produce a match

between the human, the computer, which requires services to achieve a certain level of

performance in quality and quality of the service. The determining factors which makes certain

Human/Computer Interaction design a good design can be subjective, and in dependent context.

An example is a machine designed to create aircraft parts needs to provide high quality

tolerances, where a software program that is designed to edit graphics doesn’t have the need for

such a high degree of precision. The current technology available may affect how the different

types of human/computer interaction because of the similar purpose. An example of this is the

use of graphical user interfaces (GUI), commands, menus, or virtual reality in order to gain

access to functionalities of a given computer.

The strides made in advances during the last decade, concerning human/computer

interaction, has made it almost impossible to sort through the concepts that can become a reality

and those that are fictional. The surge in research along with never-ending twists and turns in

marketing has caused much of the latest technology become available in a short time period.

However, all existing technologies can be accessible or affordable to the public. Looking at the

direction human/computer interaction is heading one thing is clear, the designs considerations

should follow the multitudes of aspects related to human behaviors. The needs and usefulness of

the new designs should be, in the end, useful to the user. The degree of complexity involved with

humans and their interactions with computers can sometimes is not visible as compared to the

simple act of the interaction itself.

The current interfaces existing now are different by their complexities due to the degree

of usability and functionality they poses, along with the economic and financial aspects, as they

relate to computers on the market. For instance, an electric tea pot doesn’t need to have a

sophisticated interface because its only function is to boil water for tea. It would not be a cost

effective feature to have an interface that would do more than a temperature control and an

on/off switch. However, a simple website that is limited in its functionality needs to be complex

enough in its usability to draw customers in and to keep them. Therefore, it should be thoroughly

thought through the design of human/computer interaction involving the degree of activities that

involves the user with a computer.

There are three different levels of user activity and they are cognitive, physical, and

affective. The cognitive level deals with the ways the users understand the overall system, and

then interacts with it. Physical aspect is what determines the overall mechanics of any

interaction between humans and computers. Thirdly, the affective level is more of a recent issue,

and tries to not only make interaction pleasurable for users, but to also affect the users in such a

way that make the users want to continue to stay engaged with the computer. This can be done

by seriously considering emotions and attitudes toward users. The focus here is mainly with the

advances made in the physical level of interaction to show the way the different ways of

interaction can be used in combination. Also, to illustrate how the different methods can be

improved upon to improve performance in order to provide easier and better quality interfaces

for users.

The physical technologies, which currently exist now for human/computer interaction,

can be grouped by what human sense the device was designed for. These interaction devices

rely on three of the human senses of vision, audio, and touch. The input devices, which rely

heavily on the sense of vision, are the most commonly used including switch-based devices and

pointing devices. The switch-based interface devices use switches and buttons, such as a

keyboard. Pointing devices include a mouse, trackballs, touch screens, joysticks, pen-based

devices, and graphic tablets input. Joysticks are devices which have both pointing abilities and

switches.

The devices which rely on audio are generally more advanced devices which usually

have some type of speech recognition. These audio devices intend to facilitated voice-interaction

as technologically possible, and as a rule, are quite a bit more difficult to produce. When it

comes to devices for output auditory, they tend to be much easier to make. Currently, there are

many kinds of non-speaking and speaking messages and signals produced by computers,

generally in the form of output signals. An example is a GPS device with beeps, sirens, and

navigation commands. The devices that are more difficult and expensive to build are the haptic

devices. These devices are designed for use in virtual reality and disability assistance

applications. They are difficult and expensive because the interface is generated through skin and

muscle sensations.

Some recent methods of human/computer interaction technologies are combining older

methods with cutting edge technologies, such as networking along with animation. These new

methods can be put into the three categories of wireless devices, wearable devices, and virtual

devices. This technology is advancing at a fast rate, where the lines between these technologies

are being blurred more every day as they are morphed together. One device which falls in this

category is a high tech military navigation system which navigates and tracks the movements of

other soldiers. Another is the PDA device used by real estate companies, that have the capability

of showing virtual tours of real estate properties. Perhaps the best known device of this type

technology is the virtual keyboard that is currently offered by a few manufacturers. This

illustrates taking the old design of the keyboard and utilizing new technology to produce a virtual

keyboard.

Some recent progress has been made in human/computer interaction which have come in

the adaptive and intelligent interfaces, and common computing are incorporated. These types of

interface comprise several levels of user functions of cognitive, physical, and affection. These

intelligent and highly adaptive human/computer interaction devices that are being used by the

majority of users are still a type of simple command/action setups using unsophisticated physical

apparatuses. The direction the research is going is focused on the designing interfaces that are

intelligent and adaptive.

It is important to make human/computer interaction designs economically sound, but it’s

also important to make them easier, more satisfying, and pleasurable for users. To succeed in

this, the interfaces must be more natural to use on an everyday basis. A prime example is the

evolution of the interfaces used with note-taking devices. At first there was the typewriter, then

we had the keyboard, and today we have touch screens we can write in our handwriting and it is

recognized and converted to text. We have also evolved to voice programs that convert spoken

words to text without writing or punching keys on a keyboard. An important factor the new

generation interfaces is differentiating from using the intelligence in the interface and the way in

which an interface interacts with users. These intelligent interfaces for human/computer

interaction incorporate some type of intelligence from the perspective of the users’ response.

Interfaces that are speech enabled use natural languages in order to interact with devices operated

by the users and it visually tracks the user’s movements.

An adaptive human/computer interaction design may not incorporate intelligence in the

design of the interface, but may use it in a way they still interact with users. This adaptive style

may be a website that uses regular Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) for the sale of various

products. If the website has the ability to see the user and saves the searches the user has made,

this would make the website adaptive. This adaptive method allows for searches to find certain

items, and suggest those items to the user. Many of these types of adaptations are ones which

deal with affective and cognitive levels of the user’s activities. An example of a device that uses

adaptive and intelligent interface is a screen that has the ability to recognize handwriting.

Another example of a device that utilizes adaptive and intelligent interface is a tablet that has

handwriting recognition with the ability to adapt. It adapts by noting corrections the user makes

to the validated text to improve its performance.

There is a factor of note in the difference between intelligent interfaces and many non-

intelligent human/computer interface designs. The non-intelligent designs tend to be passive and

only respond when provoked by the user, whereas the adaptive and intelligent interfaces are

more active. An example for this are the smart advertisement billboards that display themselves

in accordance with what the users’ tastes may be.

There seems to be a trend towards combining different methods of human/computer

interaction. This combining of methods has been touched on earlier, but there are many variants

of this concept. The computing world we live in today and the ambient, intelligent environment

is being researched at length in recent decades. The idea is to make every day computing as

ambient computing by removing the desktop computer and embedding it in the users’

environment. The goal is to make the computer invisible to people yet surround them in their

environment everywhere.

This concept has been dubbed the third wave of computing. The first wave was the

mainframe period where we had many people and one computer. The second wave was one

person and one computer or the personal computer (PC) era. This third wave would be the age

of many computers and one person. The concept is to embed a myriad of computers virtually

everywhere in our environment and in everyday, common objects. The idea is so humans can

interact with the many hidden computers wirelessly.

An interface relies mainly on the number of and diversity in its inputs and its outputs,

because these are the communication channels that allow users to truly interact with the

computer. Each one of the different single channels is termed a modality. A system based on just

one modality is termed a unimodal. A system based on different modalities can be put into the

three separate categories of audio-based, visual-based, and sensor-based.

Researchers strive to tackle the many aspects posed by human responses, which can be

captured as a visual response. Much of the research is focused on the areas of facial expression,

body movement & tracking, gesture recognition, and gaze detection of the eyes. The goal for

each is different due to how they will be applied, but in general the concepts of each can be

similar. Analysis of facial expression deals with visual recognition of emotions. Tracking body

movement and recognition of gestures are generally the focus of this category and used in direct

interaction with humans and computers in a command-action dynamics. Gaze detection relates

mainly to an indirect type of interactions occurring between user and computer. This is mainly

used to understand the users’ attention and intent in certain situations. The exception to this gaze

category is the systems that do eye tracking for assisting disabilities where tracking eye

movement, and plays an important role in command-action situations, such as blinking to click.

Some research has been trying to replace certain types of human/computer interactions,

such as, replacing audio or sensor-based with visual-based ones. An example is monitoring lip

movements to conduct lip reading, which is used as an aid for correcting errors in speech

recognition. The audio-based human/computer interaction is an important area because it deals

with the information acquired as different types of audio signals. Even though audio signals

aren’t as varied as visual-based signals are, the information received from audio-based signals

can be trusted more, more helpful, and sometimes can provide unique information.

In the past, major research has been with speech recognition however, recent research has

been shifting more towards human emotions and as it relates to human/computer interaction.

Besides the data of pitch and tone of speech, most human auditory signals such as a sigh or a

gasp help in the analysis of emotions for the purpose of designing intelligent human/computer

interaction systems.

Creating music and interaction is a new area in human/computer interaction with

application designs in the art industry. This is an area that encompasses both audio-based and

visual-based technologies, which has wide ranging applications. The one commonality both of

these areas have is that they have at least one physical-based sensor to provide the interaction

between user and computer. The sensors used can be very sophisticated or may be very

primitive, these include pen-based devices, keyboard & mouse, joystick, motion tracking,

pressure sensors, and even taste & smell sensors. Some of these have been around for a long time

while others are new technologies. We are familiar with pens for screen writing, keyboard &

mouse, and joystick devices so the focus here will be on the newer technologies.

Breakthroughs have come in motion sensors, which, is a relatively new technology that

revolutionized the video game industry, movie industry, and art industry. Haptic, or pressure

sensitive sensors are often paired with applications for robotics and for virtual reality. Humanoid

robots contain hundreds of embedded haptic sensors to allow the robots to be sensitive to and

awareness of touch. These haptic sensors are also being used in the application of medical

surgery. One interesting area of research is with sensors for taste and smell, although not quite as

popular as the other areas of research. Wearable cloth for motion capturing has been used for

some time in the production of video games. It gives the game characters more real-life

movements, and this technology has been looked in order to be used in other applications.

In conclusion, looking at the number of diverse researches and breakthroughs in

technology, it isn’t difficult to discern the time in the future when we will see computers

embedded in many locations and surrounding our daily lives. A quick look at the goals of

human/computer interaction would be enough to show this area will continue to evolve and will

take it to further levels of technology. The research is well under way of the effects that

human/computer interaction will have on society. Some predict the human/computer interaction

technologies will be ever more involved in our lives. Some call this being more intrusive in our

lives. I guess it all depends on the perspective of the person, but how ever one views it, it

definitely looks as if computers will become more prevalent in areas they were previously

absent. The direction it is heading is geared towards replacing common techniques of interaction

with more intelligent, adaptive, and innovative designs. The future looks very interesting for

human/computer interaction and the strides to be made in the area of assisting the disabled

should be bright.

CITES
Microsoft, “Being Human – Human/Computer Interaction in 2020”

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/hci2020/downloads/beinghuman_a3.pdf

Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction for Technology Executives https://www.hcii.cmu.edu/courses/introduction-human-computer-interaction-technology-executives A Moving Target—The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction, Jonathan Grudin, MS Corp. http://hubscher.org/roland/courses/hf765/readings/HCIhandbook3rd.pdf Human Computer Interaction, Alan Blackwell https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/HCI/HCI2010.pdf “The Psychology of Menu Selection: Designing Cognitive Control at the Human/Computer Interface” by Kent L. Norman

http://www.lap.umd.edu/poms/

Human/Computer Interaction (HCI), making the computer work for the human http://repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edu/classes/200r/projects/fall_1999/hci/overview.html Business Computing (Human-Computer Interaction) http://search.ucas.com/course/summary/272385/business-computing-human-computer-interaction?Feather=7&Vac=3&AvailableIn=2015&SubjectCode=16&MaxResults=1000&page=2&ret=providers CiteSeerx - Eye Tracking in Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Research: Current Status and Future http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.95.5691 The history of Human-Computer Interaction: a summary KU Leuven, iMinds
http://www.slideshare.net/biekezaman/the-history-of-humancomputer-interaction-a-summary