Models and Theories in Human-Computer Interaction/Mechanical models: New age

New Age(Sivabalan Umapathy)

Last and the current decade is witnessing a new phenomenon in the computing space. Though it doesn't need an introduction , it needs to be seen through a futuristic prism. We are living the age where the Personal Computing has transformed from a bulky static box to omnipresent information and services. The computing has now creeped into smart phones and phablets. It has now encroached even traditional medium such as Televisions. The growth of omnipresent services is fueled by both the technologies and the companies who wants to differentiate their products. The revolutionary Google glass, Google Car, Amazon drones might fail or succeed. But the glass ball reveals new age for devices in the upcoming decades.

Evolution of personal devices and ubiquitous computing in industries is also redefining the interactions.

Immersed interactions : The interaction space has changed from static one dimensional to dynamic multi dimension space. A mobile and app designers has to worry about how the user would man handle the device. More worst, it would change across users and contexts. App developers for gesture based devices such as Samsung TV's and Microsoft's Kinect needs more theories that would enable them to build effective apps.

Changing nature of task completion : Web or standalone applications on a personal computer had the luxury of getting the users dedicated attention both physically and cognitively. Design of tasks for the new age device landscape is micro and competes with various attentions the users get.

Wider target population : The new inclusive nature of these systems bring in wider target population across ages, skills and physical characteristics. At the same time this also brings in new challenges to the designers.

At the moment, there are 'best practices' and 'patterns' to apply. There are do's and don'ts ( such as watch out for Gorilla Arm Syndrome in motion sensing ). But we are still far away from building models for the new space for both bio-mechanics and HIP.