Human Interface Techniques for Computers - Coursework Example

Human Interface Techniques for Computers The man-machine relationship has always been the topic of many discourses both scientific and otherwise. Man and the machine have worked together, played together and fought together closely enough and long enough for a strong and enduring relationship to develop, grow and mature. The increasing use of machines in almost every field of human activity has resulted in even greater intimacy between man and the machine. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has turned that relationship into an indispensable mutual bond. Man now depends on the machine, the most common manifestation of which is the ubiquitous computer, to accomplish many tasks ranging from the mundane to the most complicated; and the machine depends on man to continuously develop to higher levels of sophistication in order to perform even more complicated tasks for man. As this relationship of cyclic dependency between man and the machine continues unabated, the interaction level between man and the computer has also increased manifold. Human-Computer Interface (HCI) techniques have undergone tremendous development to play a very crucial role in popularising the use of computers by the masses. At the early stages of mainframe computers, humans fed inputs into computers through punch cards, and the computer outputs were in the form of printouts. During the era Unix dominance, humans typed command lines into the computers through keyboards and the computer responded through the monitor and paper printouts. The IBM PC launched personal computing, but computing for the masses was launched with the introduction of WIMP (Windows, Icon, Mouse and Pointer). The Windows User Interface and the mouse together have revolutionized Human-Computer Interaction and made computing simple enough to be accessible to the layman. The utility of the track ball is evident in the laptop, and the joystick provided an entirely new dimension to computer gaming. Ted Nelson’s hypermedia or hypertext provided the foundation for web-based user interfaces that was to weave computer systems globally into the Internet and the World Wide Web. This was followed by the touch-screen computer systems in which the user do not have to use the keyboard and the mouse, but is required only to touch the icon which represent the information that the user desires to retrieve from the computer. As the world grows more and more dependent on computer systems, effort is concentrated on developing new human-computer interfaces that will enable faster and easier interaction between humans and computers. Context-aware interfaces Context-aware computer interfaces are being developed to enable computer systems to anticipate what the user wants without the user having keying it in. This would mean that a web application would able to sense both the mouse and eye movements of the user to determine whether the user had visited the site before, and what items would interest the user most. It would then dynamically generate a web page with the items of interest to the user on the fly. In other words, the computer would know more about want the user is doing and what it can do to help the user. Speech Recognition Speech recognition software is already finding wide use. A large number of users are utilizing speech recognition software to input text in text editing software such as Microsoft Word. Once the software is trained well enough to recognize the individualities of the user’s voice and pronunciations, speech recognition becomes a very fast and easy way to input textual data into a computer system. In speech recognition the caller’s words are captured and digitized by the speech recognition system. The digitized voice is split into individual frequency components called spectral representations which are translated into phonemes. Thereafter, complex models and algorithms determine a likely translation. Speech recognition is also being used in a wide variety of other applications such as in telephone-based customer services in which users, for example, could say the name of a company to retrieve a stock quote. Natural Language Processing has taken speech recognition to an entirely different level of sophistication at which a human is able to interact and converse with a computer system almost like interacting or conversing with another human. This much freer use of language eliminates the need to wad through menus and a hierarchy of sub-menus in search for specific information. Artificial linguistic Internet Computer Entity (ALICE) is a virtual embodied conversing program developed by Dr Richard Wallace a former professor at Carnegie Melon University. Dr Wallace combined his knowledge in computer vision and robotics with his interest in the Internet and Natural Language Processing to produce ALICE. ALICE comes with human characteristics such as a roving eye and is deemed to be the most sophisticated Artificial Conversational Entity (ACE). ALICE is however not a new concept altogether. As long back as in the second half of the sixties, a conversational program called ELIZA was developed with considerable success, and almost on the same basic principles as of ALICE (Weizenbaum, 1966). ALICE has a flexible program and can be used as a personal assistant, a conversational companion or as an audio interface with computer systems in place of the mouse and the keyboard. Programs like ALICE are used in e-commerce websites as customer service agents that respond to customer queries in animated user-friendly conversational mode. ANNA is such a program used by the Swedish furniture company IKEA. Anna engages in 20,000 conversations per day across eight IKEA country Internet pages in six languages, including English. These programs reduce call centre costs and effectively increase company sales. Speech-recognition technology finds effective utilization in mobile devices such as music systems in automobiles where the hands of the user are not free to turn a knob to select a specific song out of the thousands that are usually stored in MP3 players. Speaking the keyword into the car stereo is enough to trigger the required song on. Cell phones too are also increasingly adapting to voice recognition interfaces. They use voice tags encapsulating the name of the person being called to dial the number attached to the tag. This is akin to voice dialling. Eye-tracking technique Eye-tracking technique, on the other hand, measures the movements of an individual’s eyes so that the system is able to know where the person is looking at any moment of time and the sequence in which the eyes are shifting from one location to another. The eye movements can then be captured and used as control signals to enable people to interact with interfaces directly without the need for mouse or keyboard input. Most commercial eye-tracking systems available today measure point-of-regard by the ‘corneal-reflection/pupil-centre’ method (Goldberg & Wichansky, 2003). These kinds of trackers usually consist of a standard desktop computer with an infrared camera mounted beneath (or next to) a display monitor, with image processing software to locate and identify the features of the eye used for tracking (Poole & Ball, 2003, pp.- 2). Combining the Human Brain and the Computer The development of a new human brain-computer interface has the potential to turn human brain into automated image-identifying machines that can operate faster than the human consciousness. In this technology, the processing power of the human brain is combined with computer vision to enable people to search through images at speeds much faster that they can on their own. This technology was initially developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States in the hope of enabling federal agents to identify images of terrorists and criminals at a much faster rate and in a much more accurate way. The system works on the principle of the brain’s ability to recognize an object much faster than a person can identify it. As soon as the brain sees something interesting, it emits a signal which is detected by an electroencephalogram. As the user shits through streaming images or video footages, the technology tags the images that elicit a signal ranking them in the order of the strength of their neural signatures. This enables the user to examine in detail only the images that the brain signaled as important instead of having to do so with all the images displayed. Other Interface technologies on the Horizon The technology of Acoustic Pattern Registration attempts to create a computer-human interface out of almost any tangible or touch-sensitive material. This could enhance mobility by eliminating the need for standard tangible input devices such as keyboards, mouse, touch pads and touch screens. The main effort is to develop acoustics-based sensing technologies which can be adapted to virtually any physical object to create tangible interfaces, allowing the user to communicate freely with a computer, an interactive system or the cyber-world (Pham, et. al., 2005). Sound vibrations travel well through most solids. The vibrations caused by a finger scrawling words on a sheet of cardboard could be translated into handwriting on a computer screen by this technology. Similarly, multi-touch computer interface accords the user the flexibility to play around with and manipulate multimedia objects, text, video and graphics almost at will. A object can be stretched, cut into pieces, re-oriented, zoomed into and zoomed out of only with the use of the hands. This technology not only eliminates the need for input devices such as keyboards and mouse, but can create virtual keyboards to the size of the user if required. Multi-touch computer interface provides a glimpse of the future when the need for an interface itself will be eliminated and human and computer with interact just as humans do with each other. References -01 1. Goldberg, H., J., & Wichansky, A., M., 2003, Eye tracking in usability evaluation: Apractitioner’s guide. In J., Hyönä, R., Radach, & H., Deubel (Eds.), The mind's eye:Cognitive and applied aspects of eye movement research (pp. 493-516). Amsterdam: Elsevier. 2. Pham, D., T., Wang, Z., Ji, Z. Yang, M., Al-Kutuli, M. & Catheline, S., 2005, Acoustic Pattern Registration for a new type of Human-Computer Interface, Manufacturing Engineering Centre, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom. 3. Poole, A., & Ball, L.J., 2003, Eye Tracking in Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Research: Current Status and Future Prospects, Psychology Department, Lancaster University, United Kingdom. 4. Weizenbaum, J., 1966, ELIZA—A computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM 9, 36–45. Read More