Archive for category mental map

Early February British and French Submarine Collision

Posted by jasonwong in mental map, navigation on February 16th, 2009

Submarines have long been called “The Silent Service.” The goal is to run long, deep, and as quiet as possible. However, sometimes, you can be two quiet.

LONDON — Two nuclear submarines, one French and the other British, collided in mid-Atlantic earlier this month, reports in the British and French news media said on Monday, quoting sources in the two defense ministries.

Both submarines were damaged extensively but have returned to their home ports since the collision on the night of February 3, the reports said.

In some respects, it is good news that the submarine anti-sonar systems were working well. However, at the same time, in close quarters like that (possibly performing some kind of training exercise?), a collision between two nuclear submarines is awfully dangerous.

Sonar displays are incredibly difficult to read. It is an interesting question, though: how do you take auditory information about spatial information and display it visually over time? Sonar is not like using x-rays to develop a CT image; sonar is not meant to provide a spatially mapped picture of what’s going on outside. Instead, the displays look like this:

sonar_display

Of course, Sonar technicians are well-trained to perform their task, but it is still not an easy or natural one. An additional layer of assistance, though, are the computer systems take that Sonar information and transform it into an easier-to-read display for the Fire Control technicians. Nonetheless, Sonar interpretation not an easy task, and someone probably missed something.

I am extremely curious to find out what really happened. Considering it is a matter of British and French national security, however, I doubt it’ll become public knowledge.

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Infographics: FiveThirtyEight’s Senate Map

Posted by jasonwong in clutter, data visualization, mental map on January 1st, 2009

FiveThirtyEight.com is a political site that was incredibly useful during the 2008 US Elections for its incredible number crunching, statistical models, and data displays. Now, with the election over, the site is planning on introducing information about votes in the Senate.

The question that FiveThirtyEight is trying to tackle is how best to display the information. In my opinion, there are several important pieces of information for each data point (each Senator):

  • How they voted
  • What party they belong to
  • Where they are from

FiveThirtyEight has four different versions they are testing, and they can be seen here. An example is posted below.

senmap

A couple of things jump to mind immediately.

First, the distorted map is interesting. Every state is given two squares instead of using an actual geographical map of the US. This keeps states that are near each other close, but it can be difficult to find one specific state because this map is not immediately familiar. I think it’s kind of odd.

Secondly, there are two Senators from every state, which is a difficult thing to show. The solution of giving each senator a square so each state is two squares is not bad, but it is not especially intrinsically informative.

Finally, it is interesting that some maps throw out “Nay” information. For example, in Version A, Nay votes are crossed out, but the state name virtually blends in with the background so you cannot identify the state from which someone voted Nay. Similarly, Version D removes a majority of color information from the Nay votes, turning the square primarily black and putting the state name in the party color.

The question that should be asked is simple: what information needs to be immediately understood? The answer may very well differ. In some cases, if the vote is across party lines, the Yays and Nays should quickly indicate party affiliation. If it’s a more regional issue, then the map should be geographically accurate and filled in using similar color blocks.

As long as all the information is present, it may be worth considering using different maps or coloring schemes depending on the point that needs to be gotten across. It seems like there is simply too much information to be conveyed that any important points can be instantly seen. Instead, these maps appear as a graphical jumble that will likely be difficult to interpret.

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Navigating in Three Dimensions

Posted by jasonwong in mental map, navigation, perception on April 12th, 2008

Recently, the Human Factors and Applied Cognition program had a guest speaker, Dr. Charles Oman from MIT. He spoke on spatial cognition in astronauts, because zero gravity is an entirely unique environment for navigation. There is no natural down – when you can orient yourself in any direction, it becomes much more difficult to anchor your perception of space to a single point. This makes for navigation and even basic perception a difficult task.

Here’s an example: you are an astronaut on the space shuttle and you fall asleep for your six hours in your sleeping bunk with the Earth below you when you look out the window and shut the blinds (there really are blinds). You wake up, not knowing the shuttle has rotated 180 degrees to do something. When you pull open the blinds, you expect Earth to be below, but instead, because the shuttle has rotated, it is above you. Your spatial sense is instantly destroyed, your feet and head are in the wrong place and – apparently – you vomit instantly. What you expect is not what you perceive or feel, and this leads to a massive body-environment disconnect.

While my line of work with the Navy should hopefully never lead to instant vomiting, this did get me thinking about navigation in a 3-D space. Normally, humans are flatlanders. However, in planes and on submarines (of direct interest to me), you have to think three-dimensionally, which we’re not so good at. How do submarine navigators learn to navigate in 3-D space? Does this improve their spatial skills? How good would they be at Tetris?

I am excited to begin learning about submariners, their training in navigation, and how systems need to be designed to take this extra dimension into account. I’ll have an expert group of participants for my experiments, which leads to all kinds of excellent ideas.

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Hard vs. Soft buttons

Posted by jasonwong in clutter, mental map, physical ergonomics on February 17th, 2008

Our world is surrounded by buttons and dials with permanent labels. They are labeled with numbers, letters, symbols, and words, telling us what will happen if we push them. There is no better example than with remote controls.

remotes

The problem is that complex devices contain many functions. Remote controls then become button behemoths that require squinting and searching through a ridiculous amount of clutter to find the single button you want. Too much clutter leads to long visual search times and frustrated technology users.

So how do you make it easier to access a variety of functions without presenting too many choices at once? A great example that isn’t often thought about is that of the menus in a computer interface. The large number of functions are organized (and hidden) under larger category titles. Remotes attempt to mimic this by at least organizing similar functions together. For example, Play, Pause, and Stop all tend to cluster together.

iphone keyboard
harmony 1000		 The one hardware requirement for something like menus is a screen. You can create buttons of any size or shape at any time, leading to a dynamic display, similar to opening menus on a computer. This philosophy is taken by several products, including the iPhone and a universal remote, the Logitech Harmony 1000. By not having (many) dedicated hardware buttons, the user interface becomes infinitely flexible, allowing for more creativity to get at a multitude of functions.

One unexpected, interesting, and downright sensible complaint, however, is the lack of tactile feedback by pressing on a screen. Users don’t actually know if they’ve pressed the button or not. The iPhone, for example, displays an on-screen keyboard, and users have complained about how hard it is to type on a keyboard like that. Other devices, such as the BlackBerry or Palm Treos, have a dedicated hardware keyboard. While this leaves less screen space for the device itself, users love being able to quickly hammer out messages.

harmony one The BlackBerry may offer the proper compromise: have some dedicated hardware buttons for commonly used features, but have a touchscreen that can hide away other features and provide the dynamic interface that is so often called for. In terms of remotes, the Logitech Harmony One may do the trick: a number pad to change channels, video controls, and a directional pad. Buttons that are common to many electronic devices, and then a touch screen to take care of the rest.

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If at first you don’t succeed, you fail.

Posted by jasonwong in imagery, mental map, navigation, thoughts on December 9th, 2007

I’m a couple of months behind on the phenomenon that is Portal, a short video game produced by Valve Studios. Portal is a first-person puzzle game with an ingenious twist: you have a “gun” that can shoot an entrance and exit portal pretty much anywhere, so you can cross a chasm by shooting portals next to you and on the wall across from you, allowing you to “cross” the chasm by avoiding it all together. The game is surprisingly hard to explain, actually. I’ll just embed a video: 

The game is amazingly well done, and it makes me think about the video game and cognition research that is all the rage right now. Multitudes of studies (most famously Green & Bavelier, 2003) have shown that video game experts can process more information and have a larger functional field of view. This is just a side effect of these action video games, though – they weren’t designed to enhance cognition. A game like Portal, however, stretches the mind and requires an entirely new way to solve problems. Portal requires the player to completely re-conceptualize their concept of 3D space. Not many other tasks do that.This game provides a fascinating platform for learning this entirely new concept in a first-person environment. There are times (when learning how to maneuver a submarine, for example) when this type of spatial nonconformity is necessary to successfully complete a task. It would be interesting to examine what new cognitive skills develop as one becomes an expert with a game like this. The field of video game and cognition research is still fairly new, but I anticipate seeing it expand in many new directions, including leveraging innovative new games such as this to examine how we can train our minds and expand the way we think.

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