AFFDCDC09 FdA or FdSc Creative Digital Communication Certificate
INTERACTIVITY CDCInt.E2
Due date 15/12/2009
Background
You will be creating an interface design based on your research undertaken. Looking at some of the ideas presented and discussed in class, you need to now plan for an interface and all the details associated with it.
Brief
Using the case study that you have chosen you will be using the research you collected to design an interface that will satisfy the demands of your target audience.
You must create a:
Case Study – this will require you to research into a particular company and the changes that have happened to its interface. If the changes have been minimal or only incremental, then you should explain why that is and if this is a good course for the company to stay with.
Design Brief & Design Specification
This should include your target audience. You need to define clearly who your client is… who are they and why would they find you’re proposed interface suitable? You need to specify their current technological profile… what systems are they using, how often do they use technology etc.
Interface Design, which should be presented in a format similar to promotion for it, i.e. making screen captures for a poster etc…
You may like to include the interface as it first appears, and then how it will change / react to input/output/other
INTERACTIVITY INTERFACE
Initially I decided that because of the research that is going on around the world that an interactive interfaces that uses the iris from the human eye or brain activity alone would be an interesting option. The idea would be to use this technology for controlling and operating computer interfaces. After quite a lot of research into the work been done by well established company’s who are world recognized for there forward looking research ethos, including such company’s as the Honda Research Institute in Japan along with its collaborators; Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Shimadzu Corporation who claimed to have developed the world’s first ‘Brain Machine Interface’ (BMI) technology that uses electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technology along with newly developed information extraction technology to enable control of a robot by human thought alone. They hoped that the technology could one day be applied to car functions, allowing for the operation of the car boot or turning on the heating etc.
Unfortunately the this technology requires that there is absolutely no other physical movement. During the human thought process, slight electrical current and blood flow change occur in the brain. The most important factor in the development of the BMI technology is the accuracy of measuring and analyzing these changes. The BMI technology uses EEG, which measures changes in electrical potential difference (volts) on the scalp, and NIRS, which measures changes in cerebral blood flow, with a newly developed information extraction technology which enables statistical processing of the complex information from these two types of sensors. As a result, it became possible to distinguish brain activities with high precision as long as there is not any physical motion, but just human thought alone. The tests of the technology also required a user to where a helmet, for obvious reasons the brain controller alone I decided was a no, no?
It was at this stage I decided a more easily assessable and more feasible alternative would be to switch to the: -
An ATM (Automated Teller Machine) that incorporates an eye (retina) recognition Interface.
There are many different ways to make using an ATM machine for small or wheel chair bound people hard and very few that make it easier. Even the angle of the screen can be a perfect reflector for the sun so making it impossible to see the screen making it even more difficult for people of a lower stature to use. Some ideas would be to make the screen and entry buttons face straight out or face down or even fit the interface lower. Then there would only be a problem for the average sized or taller people. One option would be to cut off their legs to make everybody equal, but working on the fact that this would be impractical, expensive and would cause some objections in certain groups in society would make this not be a viable option.
There are several other dubious and inventive ways to get around this problem, one example of the inventiveness of people in getting around the problem is the use of mans and woman’s best friend, the dog!
They might not be able to help if you forget your Pin, but these dogs can get your money out without paws-ing for thought.
The dogs are among an army of ‘assistance dogs’ who have been trained to withdraw money from cash machines for their disabled owners.
They are adept at inserting and withdrawing cards at ATMs to help owners in wheelchairs who are often not able to stretch far enough to do it themselves.
A spokesman for charity Canine Partners of the US, which trains the dogs, said: ‘they put in the card and take it out and take out the money and give it to the person in the wheelchair. They can’t put in the Pin but a person in a wheelchair can go sideways on and do that. Up to 30 dogs are trained each year and the charity is hoping to double that figure next year. It takes two years to train them. One of the graduates of the scheme is ten-year-old Labrador dog, who helped start the ATM service by chance. The Labrador’s owner is Allen Parton, a Gulf War veteran who lost the feeling down his right side after an accident in 1991 while serving as an officer in the Royal Navy. Now in a wheelchair, he said that one-day he was struggling to retrieve his cash from an ATM when the dog jumped up to reach for the card, money and receipt with his mouth.
Another option that would be more assessable to all would be an ATM specifically designed for small and people in wheel chairs using the eye retina to identify the user and give yes/no options.
The secret code you use to get money from an ATM system would be difficult to forget. Some major banks have introduced pin less ATM’s. ATM security that let’s you get your cash with the blink of your eye. Americans made 11 billion ATM transactions last year. And ATM fraud is on the rise. A new technology called Iris Recognition records your eye for identification.
An iris pattern is highly distinctive and ten times more unique than a fingerprint and has considerably more variants then a four digit pin number which in turn would make it more secure. With PIN numbers we now use can still allow thieves to steal your number. A baddy with a high-powered video camera, hidden from view, can record you putting the number in, unless you use your hand to cover your action. With iris recognition, a video camera safely records an image of your iris. That’s the colour part of your eye. A computer uses a complex formula to turn light and dark flecks of the iris into digital code.
A human bar code is created and that human bar code becomes your identity inside the bar. In seconds your iris code is compared with the bank’s copy.
As you look at the yellow light, it’s taking a picture. It’s processed and the screen recognizes the account holder. Scientists who developed iris recognition say it’s not only fraud proof; it’s foolproof because you can’t forget it like a PIN number.
Citibank plans to test Iris ID ATM’s this next summer but the layout is still for average and normal sized people with the emphasis still on the subject looking down on the terminal.
Whether it’s iris scanning, fingerprints, voiceprints, hand geometry, face geometry or signature authentication, biometrics are rapidly becoming a cheaper, easier and more secure way to conduct business. What consumers think about it is not yet clear. A customer poll by Nationwide Building Society, said that British savings and loan that began using iris scanning last year, found that 94 percent of customers were comfortable with the system and that 91 percent preferred it to PINs or signatures. But efforts in 1997 to put a biometric on US, Alabama driver’s licenses had to be abandoned when outraged motorists refused to surrender their fingerprints. And while young techno-zealots like Pearce are easy sells on iris scanning, older customers tend to hang back: An uneasiness toward yielding information about one’s body has prompted outright rejection of biometrics among some, but libertarians of all ideological stripes have questioned biometrics potential danger to citizens right to privacy. The paramount problem is that the technology has been developing at lightning speed while the law has not developed at all. The biometrics industry is concerned enough about what it calls by some as the Big Brother Factor to have put together a set of principles for companies to follow to avoid the misuse of biometric information, although it has to be repeated that it’s only a set of principle that would be self governing and we all know that all businesses are only in business for the public good and not in business for there own profit? Their association has also urged adoption of legal standards to restrict public institutions use of the data. Electronic devices like ATM machines that have made our lives easier are likely to become more accessible to disabled people. Aiming at creating equal opportunities in the electronic age, the plan has been chalked out to make simple things like withdrawing money from an ATM machine or watching the TV by a blind person or accessing a kiosk at the railway station by the physically handicapped possible.
In India it is estimated that 50-75 million home have disabled people living at home. India has set three important policies for disabled people, one of the of the policy is that the hardware of all electronic products should be designed, developed and maintained in such a way that all, including disabled people, can use them.
The two machines shown are what’s considered to be top of the range ATM’s after trawling through a massive range of manufactures looking for an ATM that has iris recognition I found that they are not made as standard by any of the manufactures. They are only made to order. I contacted two manufactures and asked why they don’t incorporate the technology plus the facility to rotate the eye scanner, so making it assessable for users of different sizes? There reply was the Banks refuse to spend the extra cost even though the estimated cost would be paid for within four weeks with reduced fraudulent withdrawals of cash?
