Back to basics

And a bit more research on interface design for PDA's. Still having trouble with it...
Interesting article on "Guidelines for handheld mobile device interface design here.
Obviously some more research into Shneiderman's "Goldon Rules of interface design" however this is very limited. For my head here is the list of rules that are applicable to mobile devices:
* Enable frequent users to use shortcuts
* Offer informative feedback
* Design dialogs to yield closure
* Support internal locus of control

Enable Frequent Users to Use Shortcuts
As the frequency of use increases, so does a user's desires to reduce the number of interactions
and to increase the pace of interaction. Because time is often more critical to a mobile device
user. Reducing the number of operations needed to perform regular (i.e., repetitive) tasks is a key factor in the ease of use of mobile devices.

Offer Informative Feedback
For every operator action, there should be some system feedback, such as a beep when pressing a key or an error message for an invalid input value. (This also relates back to reserach carried out a while ago on the timing of page changes. Too long and the user gets bored too short and the user doesn't realise that anything has changed.)

Design Dialogs to Yield Closure
Sequences of actions should be organized into groups with a beginning, middle, and end. Users
should be given the satisfaction of accomplishment and completion, no matter whether they areusing desktop computers or mobile devices.

Support Internal Locus of Control
Users want to be in charge of the system and have the system respond to their actions, rather than feeling that the system is controlling them. Systems should be designed such that users initiate actions rather respond to them. This guideline is applicable both to traditional desktop
applications and mobile device applications.



The limitations of mobile design
"Mobile device interface design is more restrictive than desktop interface design because of relatively limited computing and communication power, smaller platform sizes, an always-changing context, and smaller amounts of user attention" I did at one point reserach Holland and Morse investigated on audio interface that leaves a user’s eyes and hands free for other purposes. However this is going against my need for visual design.

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."

Douglas Adams

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Back to the problem of design. Now I have sorted out the interfaces - well in that they work... and should do the trick and I've spent the week trying to make them look asthetically as pleasing as possible. And as I'm sure were all getting bored of hearing, and I'm certainly bored of typing/thinking/pondering; the screen size, this is the problem. Again. Its just too small to work with. When designing a web page, or an illustration, or whatever, you make the window size whatever size you want, size is no object (over the constraints of the screen size obviously). I keep getting drawn back to how I would design this piece in a perfect world. First off the general design I would make the background fancier - a Victorian style border, torn edges, different papers, materials, animated elements. I would use animated transitions between pages and use more illustration to show this. For the user input screens I would use a typewriter, and have the input sections as an old book - make the paper fly away when you submitted your answer. I would have the question screens with the animated elements also in a book - instead of blunt page changes I would make the viewer turn the pages of the book (yes its been done and is slightly 'passe' but still.. I like it)I would use a time machine a bit more - could have it flying around or teleporting through the pages. Maybe a Doctor Who effect - fuzzy blending with some interference to the picture. The possibility's are endless. I need to think this through more........

Current Investergation

We have decided on a few aspects of the game which is my chosen route of investigation over the next few weeks:

* We need a map for the player to be able to see at any time, or at least some of the time. Due to the constraints of the screen I need to find a way in which the viewer can just view segments of the map. Need to think about the best way in which to achieve this segmentation. As there is no keyboard the usual method of pressing minus and plus cannot be used.
* The screen of the IPAQ needs to be looked at. The size 5.5cm/7.5cm does not leave much to be worked with. The colours will be important as well the contrasts. As the game will be played at night (to reduce sunlight problems, reflections etc) this is also something which might possibly cause issues.
* All of the clues will have to be entered into the programme by the player. This means setting up a ‘password’ style flash page. This in itself is not a problem however the way in which the player will do this is. Again lack of keyboard means that there will have to be another way around this. First thoughts are drag and drop, but then there’s the screen limitations etc.
* The Hourglass animation which will be on the screen when nothing else is, to show the passing of the time and to remind the player that there is a limited time span. Have figured out how to time it so it can last an hour however it relies on JAVA which I’m not sure the mobile Flash can support. Have no idea where this information can be found. Another way would be to not use JAVA and find another way around the time issue. A clock would be simply, however the animation of the sand running out is causing me sleepless nights. I might have to resort to just using a simple timer/clock which is going against the original design. Or simply having an animation of the hourglass which bares no resemblance to the actual passing of time. Every 15 minutes a ‘real’ timer will flash up as well as a voice file telling you that you only have such and such time left.
* Illustrations of the ‘other reality’. Due to the screen being so small, and the design verses sound issue which I will go into again at a later date, there is only going to be a few drawn illustrations. Although I agree with this (The viewer can hardly run around and be staring at the screen at the same time) I would have preferred less movement and more design and narrative but that’s just me! Most people will be interested in the puzzles and not how it looks (How people disappoint me…) However going back to the main issue; these will be drawn from taking the surrounding landscape and changing the buildings and the way it looks. I need to research this and decide what is going to be in these drawings. Preferably I would take my inspiration from the narrative, but the narrative is not going to cover aspects like this. So for example we want an illustration of the docks while you are walking along. The river will be there and the walkway but everything else can change. Have being toying with a few ideas. Pirate ship on the river, boats coming and going (easy to animate) People walking past etc (Mostly using stop frame animation – Simple drawings put in a sequence to represent time passing) Anyway need to research this.
* Film aspects: we won’t be filming the people speaking for a while however I want to look into effects to make them blend in more with the illustrations. Was very very briefly toying with the idea of rotroscoping them, which would be great, but having already done this before, and nearly driving myself mad in the process, plus there simply isn’t enough time, this has being abandoned. But like I mentioned I would still like the style to be vaguely similar. The original idea was to have them filmed on a mobile phone. This was to give the viewer the sense of the urgency in which they were made and the general DIY feel of the game. I would still like to keep this idea- however make slight changes so it can fit in more with the general design. Possibly just a Victorian border or simply a ‘browning’ or sepia mask to keep the colour schemes generally the same.

This is where I have got to. All this work, apart from the illustrations will hopefully be resolved in the next few weeks. Once I have gathered rough SWF files of all my ideas I will try them out on the IPAQ and see how it all works.

I will report my findings.

LIFE A users manual: Georges Perec

The ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles:

"Despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other."

A wonderful book and its made me cross. Such an amazing idea and although the idea is not a new one its still blows my mind! It uses the 'Knights Tour' which I did look at last year for my fairy tale project. I'm still at the moment looking into this as it is how I plan to write my interactive novel but more about that when I finish this MA. The Knight's Tour is a mathematical problem involving a knight on a chessboard. The knight is placed on the empty board and, moving according to the rules of chess, must visit each square exactly once. There are several billion solutions to the problem, of which about 122,000,000 have the knight finishing on a square from which it attacks the starting square. Such a tour is described as closed. Otherwise the tour is open Many variations on this topic have been studied by mathematicians, including Euler, over the centuries using:

• differently sized boards
• two-player games based on this idea
• problems using slight variations on the way the knight moves.
  

The pattern made by a Knight's Tour has often been used as a literary constraint. The earliest instance of this is found in Rudrata's Kavyalankara written during the 9th century. (Wiki)

Obviously Alice through the looking glass is a fine example although I'm not sure if it would be under the rules of the knights tour. Alice is simply a chess game played out with narrative, I did recently recreate the game to see if it would work and it does. Another idea which I'm jelous of....And along the same lines as Alice, Italo Calvino The castle of crossed Destinies - My favourite of Calvinos (Apart from his short stories) Which is written using tarot cards. The narrator of the book is a traveler who arrives at an enchanted castle where all who enter are struck mute. After a silent dinner, the host spreads the Visconti-Sforza Tarot deck on the table and the guests lay out cards as a means of relating their adventures and telling their life stories. The Tavern of Crossed Destinies is Part 2 of this book. The device is the same - mute travelers who tell their stories with tarot cards, this time using the Tarot de Marseilles by Grimaud. Instead of laying their cards out in rows, they arrange them in irregular blocks with much overlap from one story to the next. As you can see there is scope for this to be made into an interactive narrative or at least use the idea of the cards - tarot or not tarot. Amazing.

The Hourglass

As the game is an hour long I have been thinking of how to show the players time running out. I came up with the hour glass - known as the hour glass as it was difficult to make one that could go on longer then an hour! Weirdly after a bit of research they were actually invented the same time as the mecanical clock. They can only be used as a basic means of telling the time. If you were to mark off five minutes on the hourglass each time you ran it, it would be slightly different. They can only tell you when the hour is up.

"Two technologies, one simple, one complex, running side by side -- the clock making a continuum of time, the hourglass segmenting it -- the clock speaking of timelessness, the hourglass showing us finality -- the clock evoking things celestial, the hourglass reminding us of base earth. They are Yin and Yang"


The hourglass, whose sands run out, was a thing of this base earth. It became a metaphor for the running-out-of-sands we all inevitably face. It became, and it remains, a universal symbol of death. This is interesting because I've been thinking of using one in the mechanical heart also. The persons life expectancy dependent on your class, IQ etc is all set when the heart is first placed inside the person. This can be terminated at any time - a simple flick of a switch and thats it your gone. Within our story the rebals have infiltrated there hearts they are no longer on the system.

"Start at the beginning"

Right need to start doing something first off we need to decide what needs to be done and then in what order, will be making a Gant chart as instructed, but this is different if you don't know where to begin.
Things to be done}
GAME:-
Narrative
Interactivity
Interface
Design
Gaming
Codes/puzzles
Location
IPAQS
Sensors, GPS, RFID, Infa Red
Speech

WEBSITE:-

Design
Structure
Content
Separate puzzles?
Links to games
Databases/HML
Flash?
Interactivity
Video?
Speech?

After talking through things today we've got to start on the structure. Once we have this we can move onto the other parts. Obviously my concern is the narrative. Breaking it up so that it works. One thing were thinking of is IF statements. However I kind of feel that this cheating. This isn't working out the interactivity, its simply programming to make it all work. The structure works in triangles. Each point of the triangle is a part of the narrative or a clue. You have to make up the triangles in order to make the final shape. The viewer will be shown there path as they walk around. This will become clearer once I post the map with the triangles on it. The problem were having is that depending on your path you might complete three or four triangles at the same time. This will mean that your bombarded with narrative and clues. We don't want this.