Here is a rough draft of key design decisions. I suspect I'm missing quite a few.
Monica ~ can you please add on key decisions used in flash and the sensors? I think that you will be able to explain it all better than I can. It should be up tonight (wednesday) so Lora can integrate it into the Keynote/PowerPoint presentation tomorrow...
Lora ~ can you please assign time slots for our user study?
All iXers ~ please add, edit, clarify, etc. You can also just leave a note here to me (or email or IM me) telling me what topics I'm missing and I'll write them up myself.
Expect more from me later today on the User Study.
Key Design Decisions
The mission of the Map-News-Table is to increase awareness of current events from an international perspective. From the start, we knew we wanted some kind of map, upon which users could slide a physical object to select regions to find out news. We weren’t at all sure about the specifics, or how our idea would be implemented.
Our first major design decision was whether to use a digital map or a physical map. A digital map allows for many more features than a physical map. For example, we could zoom in on small countries, highlight the country that the object is currently hovering over, display the name of the country, and display basic information about the country. However, a digital map would require a projection system, making it more expensive than a physical map and requiring more energy to run. While the digital map could easily be designed using the iRoom, we wanted to make sure our final product could be used without much difficulty in other environments such as libraries and student unions. Moreover, a physical map has some affordances that a digital map does not. While a physical map cannot zoom, there is something to be said for having the entire world in front of the user, all the time. It forces the user to keep a global perspective and not get too involved in one country or one small region. Also, people like paper, and people like traditional paper maps. It is fun to look at a map and see the details – city names, rivers, and so on – that would be hard to include on a digital map. And a paper map somehow seems more real, more tangible, than a digital projection. We hope that the tangible nature of non-digital objects will draw the user to the Map-News-Table and hold the user’s attention longer than yet another computer screen. While a physical map does not have as many possibilities for development as a digital map, we felt that the affordances it does have are more valuable than those of a digital map, so we opted to go with it.
Once we chose to use a physical map, it became clear that a country-based selection system would work best, since that is how the map itself is divided. So, we had to find one media source for each country. Next, we discussed what media to use to present the news. We considered newspapers, television, and radio. We decided that we would use online newspapers, since radio and television could be inappropriate in some settings, such as a silent library. We also tried to find English translations of foreign newspapers whenever possible, so we could maintain a global perspective while still providing understandable news.
We had a lot more to figure out to get what we wanted to happen to actually work. We had to figure out how to do object tracking, and how to translate position information into “The object is hovering over Country X” and “Country X was just selected”. We also had to figure out how to get this information to lead in turn to projection of news and display of the country name.
We decided to make an image map in html, outlining each country area (this is explained more in the technical coding walkthrough). We use eBeam technology to capture the object’s “clicks” (as described in Corina’s section) because the absolute positioning makes it easy to calibrate with our map webpage. We wanted to use rollover to display the name of the country the object is hovering over, to make it easy for the user to know what country it is that he/she will select on a click. However, eBeams do not support rollover technology; still, we chose to make our code using rollover so that in the future, if we figure out how to get the hardware to work, the country being rolled-over will automatically have its country name displayed. Perhaps, given more time, we could find another hardware option that would work better than the eBeams. As it is, however, there is no rollover capability so both the country name and the news site are displayed when that country region is clicked on with our puck (the object).
In order to get the country name and news site, we took advantage of the iROS multibrowse capability. The news we chose to multibrowse to a lightbox, since the large screen makes it easy to see the news, especially when more than one person is at the table at one time. Also, it keeps input (the map and puck) separate from output (the news). We chose to have a similarly large map so that it would not be hard to find news about small countries, and so that there would be a large space at the table at which groups could gather.
However, the setup of the country name display was not so easy to decide. We considered front and rear projection. We also considered projecting onto the puck itself, projecting on the map next to the puck, projecting onto the bottom corner of the map, projecting along the top of the map, projecting on a tilted screen between the map and the lightbox, and even just displaying the country name on the lightbox on a separate part of the screen from the news. We finally settled on rear projection to a tilted screen at the back of the map, between the table and the lightbox. We chose rear projection because then we could avoid hanging any projectors or mirrors, which can be earthquake hazards. We chose a tilted screen as a kind of intermediate between the horizontal map and the vertical news display screen. This is particularly intuitive in the table’s current incarnation, without rollover, since a person clicks on the horizontal table, looks to the tilted screen to check the name of the country he/she selected, and then continues looking up to the vertical screen displaying the news. With rollover, the user would go between the flat map and the tilted projection screen quite a bit; however, the screen is very close to the map and tilted right at the user, making it very easy to go back and forth between the two.