One of the holy grails of product design is to be able to see how a customer reacts to your product or service in real time, instead of relying on memory and focus groups. That requires two way communications and permission from the end-user, otherwise privacy issues start to creep in.
Two announcements this week bring this capability closer to real life.
First, Google Research announced that it has developed a prototype system that relies a home computer's internal microphone to listen to the ambient audio in a room, determine what is being watched on TV and offer web-based supplemental information, services and shopping contextual to each program being watched.
Some people might really like this; others will complain of privacy issues. How many times have you listened to a song on the radio and wondered --what's the name of that tune and how do I get it? Or to a news item and were frustrated by the lack of information and thought: where do I get more contact information?
There's no indication yet whether or when this could be available as a service.
See Google Research prototypes ambient audio contextual content
In a related note, USC engineers are perfecting a games user testing tool that captures and analyzes play experience to automatically detect weakness and flaws -- and it may soon gauge player emotional involvement.
User testing is a critical and key element crucial element of creating a new game - books have been written about it. But it remains a highly subjective and quite unstructured exercise. "Traditionally," says Tim Marsh, a post-doctoral researcher at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Integrated Media Systems Center, "game companies hire teenagers, and turn them loose trying to find flaws and gaps in the game," which they report either verbally or in writing, along with their impressions."
This is neither systematic nor scientific says Marsh, who will present what he believes is a better way at a conference presentation entitled "Continuous and Unobtrusive Capture of User-Player Behavior and Experience to Assess and Inform Game Design and Development, to be given at the Fun 'n Games 2006 Conference in England on June 26, 2006.
Marsh's method analyzes "immersidata." USC Viterbi School computer scientist Cyrus Shahabi, one of the researchers on the project, coined the term several years ago to refer to the machine-readable record of commands sent to the computer by keyboards, joysticks and other controls, collected in parallel with a videotape recording of the player at the game session.
An IMSC-developed tool called "ISIS" (Immersidata AnalySIS) can "identify data of interest and index events within the videotape. For the game development application, ISIS can return indexed examples of six different kinds of occurrences, or "points" in the immersidata/video record
- Activity completion points, when the player has finished a final task associated with a mission.
- Task completion points, a subset under this, allowing a researcher to go back over the performance of a task.
- Break points, times when nothing seems to be happening; the player isn't moving and no events occur. This can be distraction, or a break, but "break is a very important concept … because it provides clues to what interrupts players."
- Wandering points, somewhat similar times when the user-player is moving, but doesn't select any objects .
- Critical events. Some elements of the game are the hardest, and these can be pre-selected, so that action leading up to accomplishment or non-accomplishment can be studied
- Navigation errors. Collisions with a wall or object potentially point to inadequate or poor design causing user disorientation.
By backtracking from the points, investigators can see how the point developed. Similar patterns backing up parallel points can be clear indications of problem in the game.
This smart real time user feedback capability in the future could be transferred to other products or services as products get more intelligent...and gleaning important information that marketers and CEO would die for.
See more ...Computer Science Engineers Improve Video Game Testing By Analyzing The User
All of this has to be set in context, for example:
See US snoops eye social networks.
The NSA in the US is funding research to explore the "mass harvesting" of information from so-called social network sites like MYspace and YouTube. Last month it was widely reported that the organisation had been performing "social network analysis" of telephone records in the US in order to detect patterns of terrorist activity.
Now New Scientist has reported a link between the NSA and a joint research paper published by the University of Georgia in Athens the University of Maryland in Baltimore revealing how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people.
The end result would enable computers to recognise content as easily as people can, meaning all data could be easily mined by non-human sources.
Social networking information might then be combined with other information gathered such as locational data provided mobile phone records, and financial transactions recorded by banks and credit card companies.
See Sept 16, 2005 Post #11) impacts of post 9/11 smart surveillance (updated)
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