Posts tagged as multitouch

Musical Forest: A Multitouch Experience for Kids

Jennifer Darmour by Jennifer Darmour, posted September 4th, 2009
categorized under brainstorming, design, featured, inspiration, prototyping, research | Comments


Musical Forest: An Artefact Experiment from Artefact on Vimeo.

Us Artefactians regularly dabble in new user experiences outside of our daily client work that explore areas such as unfamiliar target audiences, new technologies, new UI mechanisms, or themes that spark our curiosity. As part of our experimentation platform, we recently added a shiny new multitouch display to our toolbox and were quickly inspired to set it up and start experimenting with it. Here’s what we did…

Musical Forest: an experiment in play and discovery

We have been doing a lot of work for a variety of kid age groups, so we decided to explore multitouch solutions for kids ages 3-5 years old for our first experiment with the new display. With this age group in mind, we designed and built a variety of features that helped facilitate “play” and “discovery” as the experience themes, invited kids to play, and asked them what they thought.

The experience

We set out to build a “Musical Forest” that included a variety of single-touch and multi-touch interactions. We wanted to focus on playful colors, sound and simple graphics that enticed our audience to play and discover what it can do.

As a result, we built a few main features:

  1. A fruit tree that wiggled, popped, and enabled you to flick the fruit off of the tree.
  2. Flowers that opened, closed, and encouraged you to “play” their petals like musical instruments
  3. Background trees that allowed you to drag them around and discover the “fruit people” on them
  4. Sound input, that allowed you to make the fruit fall off the trees if you increased the volume of your voice

Our learnings

Kids aren’t afraid to dive in
The kids that we interviewed were not afraid to dive in and start exploring the life-sized display from the get-go. Annet, one of the children we spoke to who is 4 years old, was excited at first glance and began to tap on the screen from the moment she saw it. She quickly started tapping every element that she could see with very limited hesitation.

Young kids don’t rely on multitouch
We originally set out to explore multitouch features such as two finger zoom. However, the kids who used our experiment never even attempted to use multitouch, so they never discovered these features. The only time multitouch was “technically” used was when multiple kids were using the system at the same time. Individually, however, they were interacting with the system using only 1 finger or their hand as a single touch point.

Kids love sound
Sound was used in a variety of ways in the experiment. One of the successes was using playful sounds as interaction feedback along with visual feedback to help the kids discover interactions. For example, when Annet tapped on a fruit element, it made a popping noise. She giggled and “popped” many fruit elements until she discovered that they could be dragged and thrown around.

The experiment also used the kids’ voice as input. The volume of their voices determined the size of the fruit. And, if the kids held their voice at a certain volume for a period of time, it would make all the fruit fall off the tree. This was wildly successful and one of the kids favorite features. In fact, they played with this feature throughout the entire session.

Kids are physical
Kids like to move around and use large physical gestures. During the interview, Annet would periodically stand up, then sit down, then stand up again. She also discovered that when she turned around, she could use her butt to “tap” on items and did this periodically throughout the interview.

Young kids like to learn from other kids
The youngest of the interviewees, Moritz, was 2 ½. At first, he was not as aggressive as the older kids in discovering what the system could do, but was very receptive to learning from them. For example, Annet would show Moritz how to use loud voices to make the fruit fall off the tree and she would show him how to make music with the flower petals. He would mimic her interactions, laugh, and enjoy the reaction. Ultimately, he was more apt to discover new things with Annet by his side showing him the ropes.

The Future Voter Experience (preview): Bouncing Michigan

Gabriel Biller by Gabriel Biller, posted October 27th, 2008
categorized under design, natural ui, trends | Comments

Like most people (presumably), we at Artefact have us some serious Election Fever! Nervous with anticipation and wishing for the most directly participatory part of the democratic process (i.e., citizens voting for their leaders and representatives) to play out with as little voter suppression and electoral fraud as possible, we found the following sketch from Fred Armisen at Saturday Night Live to be a welcome and much-needed dose of comic relief:

Surely, you all can appreciate the SNL folks’ lighthearted jab at CNN’s John King, cable television’s reigning wizard of the Perceptive Pixel multitouch display.  His skills with tapping, panning, zooming, rotating, and coloring are indeed formidable, but we can’t help but think that sometimes he just likes to monkey around.

As big advocates of surface computing and natural user interfaces, we know that multitouch surfaces and displays lend themselves to many wonderful moments of surprise and delight.  Besides enabling powerful, new experiences which allow us to manipulate all kinds of data and media in order to better understand information and be incredibly productive, these impressive technologies can be a lot of fun too.

But - on a more sober note - there are certain times and places for fun, and there are others where we need technology and systems to perform their functions accurately, reliably, and intuitively for all possible users.

Like in the voting booth, for example.

According to Clive Thompson, “new voting technologies tend to emerge out of crises of confidence.”  In 2000, we experienced such a crisis with the infamous “hanging chad” debacle in Florida.  Since then, government and election officials have scrambled to avoid similar disasters by investing in technology “upgrades.”  But so far, these experiments aren’t making anyone feel any better.  Electronic touchscreen voting systems are falling out of favor, and this November’s general election is showing a significant shift back to paper ballots and optical scan technologies.

In the upcoming days, we will share our thoughts on how technology has shaped the voter experience, not just in the actual or figurative “booth,” but in the months or years before and the days or weeks after.  We’ll take a brief look back at where we’ve been, then look ahead to what might be in the year 2028. We will speculate on how trends in technology, society, and culture may affect the future of the voting process – from the moment citizens register and become involved in educating themselves, to participating actively in democracy, to what happens when votes are being counted and results are being reported.

We believe the voter experience will become more user-centered (it already has, to some extent, with things like mail-in and early voting), but how exactly?  Will the next generation voter experience be limited to outside the polling place or inside as well?  Will the polling place be physical or virtual?  Will Americans be voting online following Estonia’s lead?  Will we add more transparency to the process by creating open-source code for our voting machines like the Aussies have already done?  Will we cast our votes using RFID or via text message?  Will it all be telepathic?!

In the meantime, though we still have dumb or suspicious machines recording our votes and possibly illegal efforts to purge voter rolls, do the Web 2.0 thing and participate, co-create, mash it up, get social, and monitor and capture your experiences (but check your state laws to make sure you aren’t breaking them!).  Here are some suggestions: