Milestones in HCI

CSE/ISE 323 Spring 2011Tony Scarlatos

Human Factors before World War II

• Prior to WWII managers in industry sought to train or fit the worker to the technology, not the other way around.

• Some studies were done to see if worker productivity could be increased due to environmental factors (such as the level of illumination in the factory). One set of studies in the 1920’s at the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric led to the identification of the Hawthorne Effect. The Hawthorne Effect indicated that increases in worker productivity were actually caused by increased motivation, due to the interest being shown in the workers, rather than changes in environmental conditions.

WWII and Aviation Safety• Col. John C. Flanagan develops the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) - a set

of procedures used for collecting direct observations of human behavior that have critical significance and meet methodically defined criteria. His research work was done for the Aviation Psychology Program of the US Army Air Force. He published his findings in 1954.

• Alphonse Chapanis is considered one of the founders of the field of ergonomics. One of his contributions was the shape-coding of cockpit controls so that they could be differentiated by touch alone. After a series of B-17 crashes, he determined that pilots were confused by the similarity and proximity of the flap and landing gear switches, so he proposed that a wheel be attached to the landing gear control and a triangle be attached to the flap switch.

Cockpit Control Comparison

The P51 was the most successful fighter aircraft of the war, in part due to its pilot-friendly ease of use.

Paul M. Fitts

Paul M. Fitts was a psychologist at Ohio State University. He developed a model of human movement, Fitts's law, based on rapid, aimed movement, which is one of the most well studied models of human motion. As a researcher of human factors during his time as Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army Air Force, Fitts became known as one of the pioneers in improving aviation safety.

Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush was F.D.R.’s science advisor during WWII. In 1945 he published his thoughts about the emerging information age in an influential article published in The Atlantic magazine entitled, “As We May Think”. His design for the Memex (Memory Extender) was a vision of the personal computer of today.

The Memex

WhirlwindWhirlwind was developed at MIT for the US Navy as a flight simulator system to train bomber crews. It was the first computer to operate in real time (using Direct Memory Access – DMA) and to use video displays (CRT’s) for output.It’s development led directly to the US Air Force’s SAGE system, and indirectly to minicomputers of the 1960’s. Chief engineer Ken Olsen went on to become the founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC).

Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE)

SAGE was an automated control system for tracking and intercepting enemy jet bomber aircraft from the 1950’s into the 80’s. It introduced real time computing and data communication using modems. Note the light pens used to interact with the system.

J.C.R. LickliderLicklider was an MIT professor who became head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), where his vision led to the development of ARPANET, forerunner of the Internet. In 1960 he published an influential paper entitled “Man-Computer Symbiosis” which introduced the ideas of human factors for the first time to computing.

Douglas Engelbart

Engelbart was greatly influenced by reading “As We May Think”. At the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) he developed the computer mouse and received a patent for it in 1970. Englebart’s lab at SRI and UCLA were the first 2 nodes of ARPANET. Engelbart was an evangelist for networked computer systems to increase collective human intelligence to solve world problems. He pioneered an early version of hypertext at the “Mother of All Demos” in 1968 that inspired a generation of technologists.

Sensorama

Morton Heilig was a cinematographer who patented a multisensory entertainment device called the Sensorama in 1962. Users were presented with a 3D movie, sounds, vibrations, and even smells from the short subjects stored on the device. It was a commercial flop, but many consider Heilig to be “the father of VR”.

Ivan Sutherland & SketchpadSketchpad was a computer program, written in 1963 in the course of Sutherland’s Ph.D. thesis at MIT, for which he received the Turing Award in 1988. Sketchpad was the first program to ever utilize a complete Graphical User Interface (GUI).Sutherland also developed the first Virtual Reality (VR) headset in 1968.

Alan Kay & the Dynabook

Kay proposed the first laptop/tablet computer, called the Dynabook, in 1968. His vision was for an educational computer for children running the Logo programming language developed by Seymour Papert at MIT. Kay later joined the researchers at Xerox PARC.

Bob Taylor & Xerox PARC

Taylor was a protégé of Licklider and became head of ARPA’s IPTO after Licklider. He then became director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where most of the foundational technologies of personal computing were developed, such as the GUI and WYSIWYG word processing.

Xerox PARCIn addition to the GUI, researchers at PARC developed Ethernet networking (Bob Metcalfe, founder of 3Comm); the precursor to the Postscript page description language (John Warnok, founder of Adobe Systems); the Smalltalk object-oriented programming language (Alan Kay); the WYSIWYG text editor (Charles Simonyi, and Larry Tessler, later chief scientist at Apple); and the laser printer (Gary Starkweather). Although the Xerox Alto and Xerox Star computers were not commercial successes, their technology was the basis for the Apple Macintosh.

The Apple Macintosh

Introduced in 1984, the Macintosh introduced the GUI and the mouse input device to personal computing. A visionary device, it even had speech synthesis. The primary developers at Apple were Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. The product shipped with 2 applications – MacWrite and MacDraw.

The Sayre Data Glove

Developed by in 1977 by Daniel J. Sandin, with Thomas DeFanti and Richard Sayre, at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, the Sayre Data Glove was the first of its kind of input device. In 1991, Sandin developed the CAVE system that is a standard for Virtual Reality (VR) environments to this day.

A later model data glove (by Thomas Zimmerman)on the cover of Scientific American in 1987

Videoplace

Developed by Myron Krueger in 1975, Videoplace was an interactive performance art piece that allowed the user to interact with the display through gestures.

The Kurzweil Reading MachineIn 1976 Ray Kurzweil demonstrated the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which relied on optical character recognition (a technology he invented), and 2 technologies he refined, the CCD flatbed scanner and Text To Speech (TTS) synthesis. This technology was developed to read books aloud to the blind. His company, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, also developed the first commercial speech recognition system.

Very Nervous System

In 1991, David Rockeby introduced his “Very Nervous System”, in which a computer observes the gestures of a dancer through a video camera. The computer then translates those movements into improvised synthetic music in real time.

The Apple Newton

Apple introduced the Newton in 1992. It was a portable computing device called a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) that used a stylus for input, and incorporated hand-writing recognition. It was unsuccessful commercially but paved the way for many PDA’s to come, such as the Palm Pilot.

The iPod, the iPhone & the iPadThe iPod digital music player was released in 2001. The “click wheel” interface and compact size of the device made the product an icon. The iPhone, released in 2007, also established a new paradigm in portable computing. The multi-touch screen interface, wireless and cellular networking, GPS, accelerometer, microphone and camera, provided developers with many new tools to craft a user experience. The iPad, released in 2010, established a paradigm for a new type of mobile device, the touch tablet.

Microsoft Surface

MS Surface, commercially available since 2005, is an interactive coffee-table sized device that supports multi-touch input and multiple users. It can also read the bar codes and magnetic stripes of objects placed on it.

Nintendo WiiReleased in 2006, the Wii features a wireless controller that is tracked by the video game system in 3 dimensions through Infrared (IR). An peripheral to the system, the Wii Fit Balance Board, communicates pressure sensor data to the system and can be used in physiotherapy.

Microsoft Kinect

The Kinect is a game controller that uses a computer vision interface, so the user’s motion, pose, and gesture are the input. The system can track the movements of 2 players. It also uses speech input.

The Future: Holographic Displays

The ICT Graphics Lab at USC has prototyped a low-cost volumetric 3D display, which presents the appropriate view of the object to all observers in the room without the need for polarized glasses.