The New York Times profiles a series of new technologies that promise to improve the avatar experience and even allow avatars to make the jump from video games to the real world. These technologies are:

Microsoft Kinect: Like a webcam on steroids, the Kinect can automatically track your body and limbs as they move around in the Kinect’s field of vision. Imagine controlling your avatar’s arm not by clicking and dragging or entering in some command, but actually moving your arm. Wild.

Nintendo 3DS: Avatars are two-dimensional representations that exist on a screen. But as 3-D technology improves, the possibilities of brining an avatar into the same room with you would greatly increase their presence and your sense of how real the avatar is.

Facial mapping: We use faces in social cognition to learn a whole lot about the other person. Technology has not yet caught up with the hundreds of little facial tics that we can make that other people pick up on immediately. However, by mapping actual photos of our faces onto our avatars, we may feel more comfortable interacting with a digital representation of another person.

These technologies can be combined to create an avatar that’s more realistic, easier to control, and more present in the environment. Maybe you don’t need to trek across the country for your next business trip after all.

From the New York Times: 3-D Avatars Could Put You in Two Places at Once

Does that mean dogs are stupid? Not necessarily. A professor from the University of Colorado came up with the “yellow snow” test. Scoop up some freshly created “yellow snow” from a dog, then place it on some snow for the dog to come across later in its walk. If the dog sniffs the yellow snow for less time than usual, perhaps it recognizes his own smell and moves on. Self-aware? Possibly. Certainly an interesting read!

From NPR: I Sniff, Therefore I Am. Are Dogs Self-Conscious?

What’s great about the story is that the neuroscientist, James Fallon, asked his mother about family history. And what does he find out? He’s related to Lizzy Borden, the famous supposed murderer. He’s also related to some other very bad people. However, Dr. Fallon is not a serial killer (or so we are supposed to believe!). He had a positive childhood, unlike many psychopaths, who have terrible childhoods that seem to tip the scales towards murder. The triad of genes, brain activity and upbringing seem to trigger it. Thankfully, Dr. Fallon’s scales did not tip that way, and now he is a neuroscientist, helping to unlock the mysteries of the brain.

A fascinating read.

Now, let’s say you’re in the middle of the updates and want to see if there’s anything new. How, in the user interface, can you present the “Update Statuses” feature?

1.) You can include a little refresh button that we’re all familiar with from web browsers. This would be at the top of the screen and always visible. This is an obvious choice and a pretty good one. Too many buttons up top, though, and the interface may start looking cluttered. However, for this presentation, the function is always one click away. Not bad.

2.) As you scroll to the top of the status updates, when you hit the top, there is a button you can press to refresh the status updates. This is what the Facebook app does. For this presentation, you need to all the way scroll up and then press a button.

3.) The Twitter app for the iPhone is similar to the Facebook app, but as you are scrolling and you hit the top of the update stream, there is not a button to press. Instead, you keep “pulling down” on the list.

I like this option for two reasons. One is that as you’re scrolling up, you are continually making the downward-swiping motion. So, when you hit the top, you’re bound to “accidentally” activate the Refresh functionality – but since you’re scrolling back to the top, you want to read the most recent updates anyway. It’s almost like mind reading. The program has integrated your natural scrolling motions into the update functionality.

Option 3 is nearly automatic, while Option 1 is more intuitive. But Option 3 has more thoughtful design in it because it takes advantage of the touch interface. As we interact more and more with touch, buttons may soon seem dated. That will be a strange day.

At NRL, he heads up the Cognitive Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction group, and one of his projects is Octavia. Octavia is a humanoid robot that they are essentially trying to make more human in behavior as well. The researchers are using a subfield of artificial intelligence known as cognitive modeling. While traditional AI systems generate algorithms that simulate human behvaior and implement them in a programming language, cognitive architectures impose restraints about how much we can remember or how fast we can move our eyes. The resulting “programs,” or cognitive models, are able to mimic human performance much better than traditional AI methods can.

Anyway, enough talk! What can Octavia do? For now, play Rock Paper Scissors. Hopefully, in the (far) future? Augment human sailors on our Naval vessels.

Take a look!

So if the swiping gesture that is so common on the iPhone and iPad is not present, what do you do? The help menu in GoodReader can help. It can display the “hot zones” in the display that will do different things. Here is what it looks like.

All i have to say is wow. You click on the center to bring up the menu, and you click in the top or bottom of the display to get the page to turn to the right or left. I honestly do not know what the other areas do. I have tried to tap on them, yet nothing happens. I sometimes turn the page accidentally when I want to bring up the menu because I did not tap in the right place in the invisible box. If the box was visible, it would be user error. But an invisible box? A design horror.

Since this is an eReader app, the primary function should be reading and executing page turns. The interface is not built that way, as this mess of hot zones is a result. If the developers were to stay focused on users and how they use the reading interface, this likely would not have happened.

The rest of the software is very good and extremely capable. The developers say that they are working on fixing the page turning interface, and here is hoping they do it right. Include the most common gestures as a priority, then figure out how to incorporate the less important ones.

For comparison’s sake, and a particularly good example of this, I will use IMDB. Here is the website on the iPad.

It is the site that we are all used to. Information is broken up into sections, separated by whitespace. If you want to see more information, you scroll the entire webpage, click on a link, and the whole page will reload. Here is the IMDB iPad app. Same information, but a much different layout.

As you can see, this is way different than the website. Information is broken up into sections, but each section can be scrolled through individually.

One more: the Reuters app. Reuters is a news organization, much like the Associated Press. They are not necessarily a go-to homepage for Internet users (I usually think of CNN, The New York Times, NPR, BBC, etc.), but the iPad app is fantastic.

Stories are broken up visually with lines, sections are broken up by color, and each section (Top News, Top News Video, and Business) are each scrollable on their own.

In terms of the Adobe vs. Apple/Flash vs. No-flash debate, it is almost as if the iPad apps for news and other information-driven sites are delivering the slick, visually appealing information display that Flash always seemed to promise but never delivered. People don’t want to have to open a bunch of separate programs to see news and weather on their computers, nor do they want a site that opens up a big Flash app (some sites do that, but not news sites).

Launching each program on its own it is the way of doing business on the iPad, so it seems natural to have separate apps for news, weather, IMDB, and Wikipedia. It is an interesting paradigm shift, but one that I think app developers have taken advantage of. The way information is formatted and displayed is going beyond what the web can provide for now. We’ll see where HTML5 takes us, but for now, it is the iPad. Or, if Adobe has its way, it is Flash. Hrm – Adobe vs. Apple for the future of information display? Should have seen this one coming.

Before we get to the answer, let’s analyze this a little bit. Black background, big bold white letters, and a symbol. What does that symbol mean? Warning? Danger? Electricity? Something like that, right? “It’s common sense!” If something is dangerous, use the color red and put a universal warning label on it. Duh, right?

Click for the answer!

A service called Defense Connect Online, which is a modified version of Adobe Connect. What does it do? Remote meetings! Whiteboard, chat, screen sharing, voice communications. So people in various locations around the world or country can have a meeting.

Why does the logo need A WARNING SYMBOL? The warning symbol says “Warning! DO NOT USE.”

It has also been a couple of months since I’ve posted a new entry. I hope to get started again soon with lots of new interesting posts. Keep your eyes peeled, and please update your bookmarks!