Tag Archives: #UX

relating to any or all of a user’s experience when using a physical or virtual thing; not limited to the 2D interface of a digital display

Selling the Experience

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I had this conversation again yesterday:

Friend: Can you imagine that? Someone paid like a $100 for this sword-thing and it’s not even real! It’s nothing. Make believe. It only exists in the game.
Me: You need to think about it differently.
Friend: But it doesn’t make any sense. They’re buying nothing!
Me: What do you buy when you get tickets to a baseball game? Or a concert?

The only thing I can figure is that the perception of reality blinds people to this obvious commonality: virtual products aren’t much different than most entertainment, whether it be going to the Indy 500 to watch people race cars in a circle or going to Disneyland to visit Space Mountain, none of it is stuff you can put in the car, take home, and place on your shelf.

People don’t play video games because they have to, they do it because it’s fun. It’s a luxury we enjoy in developed countries when our basic needs are met. It’s really just like going to a sporting event. And there is also a social element. Perhaps not as immersive as the real thing (having a beer spilled on you in the bleachers is pretty immersive), but which is more social: watching the television alone in your room or playing Counter-Strike online with your clan?

The point is that what we now think nothing of was unthinkable not so long ago (e.g. paying some guy millions of dollars to dribble a ball on a wooden floor); and what is unthinkable now will likely be common in the not too distant future. Let’s not forget, there was a time when being an Actor was an almost shameful profession (in some parts of the world, they still think paying people to act is laughable). Which leads me to this article over on Gizmag about a videogame tournament with a $1,000,000 prize. Maybe when you read the article, Mark Cuban’s comments on broadcasting these videogame tournaments at digitally-enabled movie theaters doesn’t sound so far-fetched.

Parisi Speaks

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Nice couple pages over on C|Net about the (re-)emergence of web 3D in an interview with vr pioneer Tony Parisi. Good article. The only issue I have is this quote from Mr. Parisi:

The bulk of the interface design will come from (the) gaming community, with additional innovation through these proprietary 3D chat worlds. But in most of these chat rooms, there’s nothing to do! You see someone’s avatar, and they’re picking their nose. It’s a piece of glitz attached to text chat. In an application like “Everquest,” you have exactly the same environment design and you’re there to do something. There has to be a purpose.

There is no real “purpose” in Second Life either other than what people who sign on bring to it, yet they somehow either manage to find things to do or not – just like most people do in real life. The assumption that people want to do more doesn’t really jive with what I’m discovering. Not everyone wants to spend their evenings slaying dragons or mining virtual gold or, for that matter, creating virtual content or managing virtual property; alot of people just chat about real life issues. So in that way, these 3D interfaces are more like teleconferencing than gaming. Now that the technology is here, we might discover that most people would rather just talk than fire their BFG’s at each other.

I also wonder if Parisi is aware of the serious discussion going on about open-sourcing Second Life. I mean, how can Linden Labs not be aware of the open source solutions beginning to invade their space… one of the people behind Croquet is giving a virtual talk inside Second Life! Interesting times. Now excuse me while I load Maya and work on a nose-picking animation.

Jobs Machine

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Wired online has a nice write up/excerpt from the soon-to-be released unauthorized biography of Apple’s CEO and pitchman, Steve Jobs. The article is about industrial design, the iPod, and a washing machine. I found the washing machine bit especially interesting since, if I recall correctly, Nissan’s former design guru Jerry Hirshberg went through a similar ordeal. I think he bought a European machine as well.

Virtual Festivus

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Feng in Q3

Wired online is carrying a nice little article on Boston’s Cyberarts Festival. For me, the above image in their online gallery showing creator/artist Feng Mengbo inside Quake 3 is the most interesting, but I suppose that has more to do with my familiarity with the game than with what’s being done (I should give Feng my Squidgun model, the Rocket Launcher is so 90’s – besides being copyright id Software). From his site, it appears this is more documentation than interaction unfortunately. A shame.

For cool interactivity, Imaging Places is probably the highlight as it’s starting to move into new territory. From Wired:

Imaging Place reflects that real-and-virtual connection, by allowing viewers to navigate a map image, projected against a wall in a darkened room. The viewer of the Lowell piece, for example, mouse-clicks on certain parts of a satellite photo of the Lowell area, and zooms in to see videos of oral histories and bits of wisdom as told by local people.

This reminds me of my previous entry regarding augmented reality being used at historical sites. If only Feng was pulling that one off. I’m just waiting for someone to stream 3D data based on GPS position. Maybe then Feng’s visuals will mash-up with the interactivity currently limited to 2D imaging. And then… well, then we can fight over a virtual doll and create our own virtual holiday.

Stranger In A Strange Land

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Jellybean Madison

As mentioned in a prior post, I’ve been spending some time exploring Second Life’s virtual world. One expects that objects, graphics, animations, physics and the rest improve in this corner of cyberspace just like they do most everywhere else. That’s just technology, and videogames have certainly been showing off some amazing things lately. But what I’m finding interesting is how real people interact with – and through – this virtual world.

Take for example the above image, “sittin’ at the crick…”. For lack of a better description, this is a “photograph” snapped by an SL “resident”, Jellybean Madison. She (apparently) posted it online from within the SL simulation using a third party tool called Snapzilla. I’ll let them explain it:

Snapzilla [is a] new feature from SLUniverse that allows everyone in Second Life to share their snapshots with the world, directly through SL. Downloading snapshots to your hard drive and then uploading them is hardly spontaneous. With Snapzilla, you just click the Snapshot button in Second Life and choose Email Postcard and you are on your way to sharing your snapshots.

An image posted and given a caption? Emailed to others? Shared? Why? I don’t know exactly because I’m too new to the experience. But I have noticed that there are other, similar tools in beta which send images to sites like Flickr, possibly the best known and most popular image-hosting website on the net. So these snapshots will be seen by a large audience; many of whom have never been inside a virtual reality sim. Furthermore, in as much as all images online are really nothing more than colored pixels, these “photos” are as real to the strangers who view them as the “real” photos taken in meatspace using a 35mm. And when the graphics improve in years to come, who’s to say what’s valid and what isn’t?

But it doesn’t stop with photos. I was checking my email yesterday and discovered that an “in-world” message had been forwarded to my real world email. Lines blur. It’s one thing to know of this interactivity and another to experience it. And even more interesting are the number of independent projects coded by residents for doing things like tracking virtual world assets (which have real world value in many cases) outside the simulation. Now that sounds like the kind of thing Microsoft should build into their Xbox 2 feature set.