Envisioning a Path to the Future

Networked 3D Game Possibilities - Ray Uzwyshyn

The notion of journey as a visual paradigm for an information system is relatively new. Conventional wisdom says a serious information system user (i.e. Pubmed, Proquest, Web of Knowledge) satisfies information seeking needs in qualitatively different ways from an X-Box or Playstation game player. Rarely have these systems been spoken about with meaningful synergy in mind. Having said that, what are the possibilities of remapping current 3D online game paradigms onto serious ‘text’ based information systems?

Can a visual 3D character based hunter/gather metaphor be applied to more serious information seeking (information foraging) purposes? Can this in turn be mapped onto 3D current first person seek and find/destroy paradigms? Kate Walker, a Lara Croft Tomb-Raider type 3D character rendering in the prize winning game Syberia, is an ambitious young lawyer in the small alpine village of Valdilene. Kate’s simple assignment is to find Hans Voralberg, the aging proprietor of an automaton factory. For information system designers, the trick is to take this ‘information gathering’ puzzle environment and map this onto more robust cognitive cartographies.

Most online 3D games use a first or third-person perspective, mouse or specialized interface and controlled graphics environment. The user plays or directs a character as he or she tries to track another object/character down. Interfaces are largely intuitive; cursors interactively change to indicate actions, right clicking opens inventories – all is automatically updated and ‘saved’ as a character in a game learns more. What are the possibilities of taking ‘the long scrolling’ text based ‘results’ paradigm of a search engine such as Google and mapping these onto this 3D engine environment? How can using a networked 3D online character as the ‘searcher’ enable epistemological horizons, allow us to envision new knowledge relationships and enliven and open the search process to new modalities?

Solving puzzles generally fits well with online 3D networked games. In fact, many networked game environments provide user populations in the millions (i.e. Everquest, Morrowind). What we must begin to examine are similarities and differences in these collaborative puzzles’ and their confluence with higher order knowledge generating collaborative processes. Online games currently gross more than Hollywood. They are second in U.S. exports to defence. They deal with visual stories, polyphonic narratives and complex visual organizing metaphors in naturally intuitive ways. How can we now begin to apply and leverage these tropes towards information systems?

On the whole. online 3D game puzzles are solvable rather than mind-bending. As long as a character searches his or her surroundings carefully in a 3D game environment there is little chance of not finding an answer. The 3D game paradigms being developed today are sensitive and intelligent information systems enhanced by a human user-centred design that children easily understand. As characters commence information seeking journeys they are concerned not only by ‘winning’ through ‘correct’ information but the information seeking journey itself.

Current online multiplayer games provide extensive future network and collaborative possibilities. The 3D characters within cinematic systems and virtually realistic environments open the door to very interesting future information systems. Most 3D online games being developed today offer unthought out possibility for future information system development with an intriguing and compelling naturally human story that heralds nothing if not the future of HCI and ‘information visualization. These games are enjoyable and largely unexplored by an older generation of information scientists who would benefit to spend a couple months with an X-Box, Playstation or Game Boy very much keeping visual synthesis and their own legacy systems in mind.

Ray Uzwyshyn
University of Miami Digital Library Initiatives

The Human Face and LUI's - Christopher Crawford

The process of conveying information through visual means is too often thought of in purely spatial terms. We try to map concepts into space and then present that space. This works wonderfully for those people blessed with strong spatial reasoning skills, but fails badly when used on those not so blessed.

There is no reason for such narrowness of reach. If we think in terms of visualization rather than spatialization, we can break away from the rut in which we're caught. The trick is to search for other modes of human cognition that are nonspatial. Two in particular strike me as worthy of further development: emotional, as visualized through faces, and linguistic, as visualized through the written word.

The presentation of human faces in software is woefully inadequate.
Whether we like it or not, people anthropomorphize their computers and relate to them in emotional fashion. We can convey important information to the user through facial displays. For example, various error messages can be accompanied by faces showing varying degrees of alarm, to communicate the seriousness of the problem. Skeptical faces, inquisitive faces, intent faces can all be used to communicate important information to the user. Most important, good facial displays can do wonders to help a user navigate through the kind of complex problems that now bedevil many users. The stupid paper clip used in some Microsoft software has cast doubt on the concept, but remember that a good concept can always be unfairly discredited by a poor implementation.

The use of linguistic structures seems a throwback to the bad old days of command-line interfaces, parsers, and all that nonsense. But if we approach language as not such a sequence of characters, but a grammar for combining words into meaningful expressions, we can see the value of Linguistic User Interfaces (LUIs). The trick is to use a subset of a natural language that is OBVIOUSLY a subset; if the user ever thinks that we are offering true natural language, then s/he will surely end up frustrated with our presentation. If instead we offer a kind of "baby talk" with the computer, we can greatly expand the working vocabulary of our users and offer large feature sets unhandicapped by clumsy user interfaces. Remember a LUI is distinguished from natural language in that it is interactive. Interactivity makes it possible for the computer to interact directly with the user during the framing of his/her expression, thereby greatly simplifying the interaction.

Christopher Crawford