The familiar interfaces that have allowed humans and computers to communicate are being transformed before our eyes. The era of pointing, clicking, or typing is giving way to new seamless, intuitive links between the two worlds. This issue presents two very different special sections with one common anthem: It’s clear we’ve reached a turning point […]
March 2000 - Vol. 43 No. 3
Features
A growing circle of space and tourism industry veterans say leisure trips to the cosmos are just a few years away. More than a dozen startup companies, encouraged by the traveling public’s desire for new experiences and the technology needed to make space travel possible, are working to build rockets safe enough to carry paying […]
I read Robert Glass’s "Practical Programmer" column ("Evolving a New Theory of Project Success," Nov. 1999, p. 17) and would like to add a practitioner’s point of view. First, I agree software projects need "More accurate and honest estimates. More understanding of the complexity of scope. More expert help." If we had all this, we’d […]
Practical Programmer: Y2K and Believing in Software Practice
Naysayers made an event-turned-nonevent more unpleasant than it needed to be.
On Site: Using Telemedicine in the Department of Defense
Utilizing connectivity to provide and manage medical care in global times of crises.
Sharing Standards: Standardizing the European Information Society
New steps and rapid approaches in the effort to mainstream Europe's standards process.
From the President: Trademarking the Net
Net-based shopping is becoming commonplace, and the value of Internet real estate has become obvious both to established companies and to new Net-based companies. Name recognition is synonymous with an easy-to-remember domain name. Because there is only one dot-com top-level domain name, names in the dot-com domain have become a scarce resource. The irony is […]
Viewpoint: Exploring the Telecommuting Paradox
According to a recent survey conducted by the International Telework Association and Council, 19.6 million U.S.-based employees telecommuted in 1999 (www.telecommute.org). Although some 62% of companies are reportedly encouraging telecommuting [1], a mere 7% of employees actually telecommute. This curious dichotomy—the small number of telecommuters despite the apparent plethora of telecommuting programs in organizations—has been […]
Perceptual User Interfaces (introduction)
There is no Moore’s Law for user interfaces. Human-computer interaction has not changed fundamentally for nearly two decades. Most users interact with computers by typing, pointing, and clicking. The majority of work in human-computer interfaces (HCI) in recent decades has been aimed at creating graphical user interfaces that give users direct control and perdictability. These […]
Perceptual User Interfaces: Perceptual Intelligence
Good-bye keyboard, so long mouse. Hello smart rooms and clothes that recognize acquaintances, understand speech, and communicate by gesture. And that's just the beginning. . .
Perceptual -User Interfaces: Haptic Interfaces
Creating interfaces that envelop a sense of touch has met with measured success.
Perceptual -User Interfaces: Multimodal Interfaces that Process What Comes Naturally
Using our highly skilled and coordinated communication patterns to control computers in a more transparent interface experience.
Perceptual -User Interfaces: Affective Perception
Imagine you have just logged into your new computer, and it is displaying some of its fancy features. It then begins asking you a series of questions. You are in a hurry to get to your email, but it pops up with yet another start-up window to set some option that is not necessary to configure now. You exhale, frown, mutter something under your breath, and proceed to type with a little more speed and intensity.
Perceptual -User Interfaces: Things That See
Exploring machine vision for human-computer interaction.
Perceptual -User Interfaces: The KidsRoom
Computer vision sensing technologies turn a child's bedroom into a dreamy wonderland.
Perceptual User Interfaces: Perceptual Bandwidth
What happens to people when computers become perceptually complex?
Programming By Example (Introduction)
Avoiding the voodoo of conventional programming, users get personalized solutions to one-of-a-kind application problems that can be used over and over again.
Programming By Example: Novice Programming Comes of Age
Stagecast Creator lets children and other novice programmers build interactive stories, games, and simulations without syntactic programming languages.
Programming By Example: Intelligence in Demonstrational Interfaces
A system needs the right level of intelligence to infer the correct generalizations from examples while providing enough feedback to keep the user in control.
Programming By Example: Programming By Analogous Examples
Combining programming by example and real-world analogies, users create new behavior out of existing behavior.
Programming By Example: Programming By Demonstration For Information Agents
Let users teach their own imperfect software agents what to do and where to do it.
Programming By Example: Generalizing By Removing Detail
To generalize programs in ToonTalk, use an animated vacuum cleaner to remove the details in virtual robots' thought bubbles.
Programming By Example: Visual Generalization in Programming By Example
Let PBE systems use the visual properties of on-screen interactive elements to bridge the user's view of an application and its underlying programmable functionality.
Thinking Objectively: Software Engineering in the Small
Smaller-sized software companies are developing significant products that need effective, tailored software engineering practices.
Inside Risks: A Tale of Two Thousands
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but now it is time to reflect on the lessons of Y2K.
