Kirill Zdornyy

Medical UI in Deus Ex : Human Revolution

Wed, 25 May 2011 11:41:54 -0700

Deus Ex : Human Revolution (developed by Eidos Montreal) is the third title in a series that originated with a game which basically redefined PC gaming. Human Revolutions is set to be released this fall but the studio had already put up some awesome trailers and artwork. I’ve snapped some shots from their trailers below.

User interfaces in games aren’t suposed to look realistic, accurate, or be very useful. They are there to look badass. We can draw inspiration from them when designing real-world UI.

Coming soon!

Sun, 01 May 2011 19:29:43 -0700

Coming soon!

"User interface for your body."

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 20:15:47 -0700

“User interface for your body.”

- Originally “user interface for running” which is what Paul Stamatiou called the Nike+ chip in his Nike+ commercial.

Medical user interfaces in games

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 18:23:00 -0700

This is a follow up to Medical user interfaces in film. Just like in movies, user interfaces in games aren’t suposed to look realistic, accurate, or be very useful. They are there to look badass. We can draw inspiration from them when designing real-world UI.

Halo: Reach (2010)
“Birth of a Spartan” Extended Live-Action Short (YouTube)
Director: Noam Murro
Agency: agencytwofifteen

Notice the four screens (two on the left and two on the right)

Deus Ex (2000)

DOOM 3 (2004)

Medical user interfaces in film

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 17:59:00 -0700

User interfaces in Hollywood blockbusters aren’t meant to look realistic, accurate, or be user friendly. They are there to look badass. That, however, doesn’t mean we can’t draw inspiration from them. I have taken apart countless UI scenes frame by frame and learned about the studios that designed them.

Some of my favorites ones are listed below. You can find high res pictures by going to studios’ pages.

Iron Man 2 (2010)

Created by Prologue

Iron Man 1 (2008)

Tony: “Now, when you pull it out just make sure you don’t pull out, there’s a magnet at the end of it…”

Pepper: “What’s wrong?”

Tony: “Nothing, I’m just going into cardiac arrest because you YANKED it out.”

Notice the change in color from blue to red in the screen behind them.

The following is the final fight scene between ~~The Dude~~ Obadiah and Tony. Notice the information bubbles on the right (PET, EKG, EEG, TEMP) in the first and (ARM, ARC, ENV, ICE) in the second (along with PET redlining). Click on the pictures for higher resolution.

The Island (2005)

Star Trek (2009)

Click for higher resolution.

Also check out Medical user interfaces in games!

Use of QR codes on food packaging in Japan

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 01:52:00 -0700

I think that the use of QR codes on food packaging is an interesting concept with many applications: from getting nutrition information to being able to track down the source of every item in your fridge. If anything, it could serve as an additional medium for broadcasting food contamination alerts.

In terms of gauging the progress of these applications being adopted in the West, I found this exchange quite distressing. Funnily enough, those are from summer 2010. Food producers in Japan have been allowing consumers to check food safety by using QR codes on food packaging since 2004.

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait..."

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:11:46 -0700

““The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.””

- Chuck Close

We Are The Digital Kids

(via davemorin)

"They blocked tumblr at my school. Apparently it’s a “Social Networking” site. I might drop out of my..."

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 13:01:00 -0700

“They blocked tumblr at my school. Apparently it’s a “Social Networking” site. I might drop out of my computer classes now…”

- azezy (via david)

On Human-Computer Interface (HCI)

Tue, 11 May 2010 19:01:06 -0700

I’ve recently become fascinated by the use of EEG/EMG for the purposes of brain-computer interfacing (BCI). This may seem as a giant leap from the traditional interface methods which we’ve become accustomed to: keyboard, mouse, voice, touchscreen, but in reality, is BCI really that far fetched?

Electroencephalography (EEG) is not a new concept, but it seems to be gaining popularity as of recent with Texas Instruments pushing their new front end for ECG/EEG and companies such as NeuroSky (www.neurosky.com), Emotiv (www.emotiv.com), and OCZ (linky) releasing EEG technology oriented at gaming.

Working on this would be a mindful as developing the technology required would involve medical & electrical engineering, psychology, physics, computer science and neurology.

There will be a Stanford conference conducted on this topic on May 16:

“The Business of the Brain” http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=339

30 Days in Silicon Valley

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:00:00 -0700

“If you want to do movies, you go to Hollywood; if you want to do fashion you go to Milan or New York; if you want to do a startup you go to Silicon Valley.” This phrase, in one shape or another, has been voiced by pretty much everyone I met here in California during my thirty day tour - and I can’t but agree with them.

As I’m sitting at the San Francisco International Aiport waiting to board my plane back to Vancouver, BC, I am already planning my return back here. It won’t be easy, but I feel that it is what I must do even if it takes going through an alphabet soup of visas and paying steep legal fees.

Maybe it’s the relaxed atmosphere of the Silicon Valley that had allowed the minds of so many geniuses and visionaries to roam free and create world-changing technology. People are definitely friendly and welcoming here. Not everyone you meet is working on “the next big thing”, but everyone is keeping an open mind out for one. That is what creates this perfect environment to inspire and be inspired.

The Bay Area is home to some of the most brilliant minds in the world. Not surprising, considering it houses Stanford, Google, Yahoo, Sun, Microsoft and virtually every major web startup in existence. Ideas are born here, over shots of esspresso in the coffee shops of San Francisco, after lectures in the classrooms at Stanford, or over weekend beers inside the home offices of Palo Alto.

The startup community welcomes newcomers and everyone is open to a geeky chat on where things are now and where they will be in the next few years. Nowhere else can one hope to get a better prediction of the direction a new technology will take than in Bay Area. Being in another part of the world, reading the tech news and forecasting is one thing. Witnessing the news being made is something entirely different.

It may be called “living in a bubble”, and perhaps rightfully so, but I’d rather be in a bubble than floating in stale water. There is no harm in being exposed to an uncontrolled flow of free ideas as long as you don’t lose your own sense of direction. More so, exposing yourself to intelligent people and rubbing shoulders with those who are smarter than you drives you to challenge yourself, to broaden your imagination, and, hopefully, to shift your entire paradigm for the better.

Here I have made new friends and connections, picked up new ideas, and had a fresh breath of inspiration set it into me. I realized what I had been missing: I once had grand visions on the future of technology. Visions gradually took a second place to lengthy financial spreadsheets, and business plans. I’m not saying that those aren’t important, on the contrary they are some of the most powerful tools in the entrepreneur’s arsenal, but they are not the primary reason I wanted to start my own company. The reason was the original vision of being able to make a difference, create meaning and make change. I am lucky to have felt that again here and am embarking on a brand new and very ambitious project as proof.

Silicon Valley, ‘till we meet again!

How Mint acquires 1.5+ million users

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:12:11 -0700

How Mint acquires 1.5+ million users

Applied Location Theory (Part I)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:11:45 -0700

An XYZ brick-and-mortar store is located at (X Lat, Y Lng) in an urban area with a walking radius of R miles. A total number of C established mobile connections have been recorded in this area between timestamp T1 and timestamp T2. Of those C connections, F was the number of check-ins and W was the number of mobile web requests.

An E percentage of those check-ins were within F miles of location G. E >= minimum required percentage H necessary to qualify as a hotspot.

Keywords K, L, and M appear in J percent of user content generated within F miles of location G. An N percentage of that content is positive :), O percentage is negative :( and P percentage is neutral :|. A Q percentage of that content is generated by males, R percentage by females, and S percentage of undefined gender. T percentage of that content is active (e.g., “I’ma get me sum Sunny D!!!”) and U percentage of that content is passive (e.g., “This shit sucks.”).

Database of planned events indicates a T number of type U events within F miles of location G between timestamps T1 and T2.

Campaign C1 targets individuals of G1 gender between the ages of A1 and A2 at type U events within R miles of (X Lat, Y Lng). C1 success rate E1 is calculated by number B1 of delivered ads between timestamps T2 and T3 divided by the C1 number of recepients who have taken action D1 (i.e., rate of conversion into action).

TBC

DIKW model applied to mobile web analytics

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:22:00 -0700

DIKW: “Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom”.

Data: billions of raw (unanalyzed) logged traffic entries. At the data stage, looking at each individual row of data would be pointless as it would not be telling you anything meaningful (let alone useful).

[UID] [username] [Lat] [Lng] […] [timestamp]
…
[10425] [MArrington] [11.781325] [-142.185059] [Twitter API: “Snorkeling!”] [1268596735]
[10697] [SBrin] [27.59] [-86.56] [GBuzz API: (link)] [1268596961]
[11024] [LPage] [19.52873] [-154.874268] [GBuzz API: “Hawaii!”] [1268597961]
…

Information: the second you began looking for relevance within the data, it became information. Unfortunately, the amount of data that would be generated during a single visit to one of your websites from a mobile phone would make it impossible to analyze it by examining individual entries (unless you’re John Nash!).

(0.5 second GPS updates) X (60 seconds of exposure) X (3 visits per person) X (40,000,000 visitors per day) = forget about it.

To proceed further, we have to introduce a filter criteria. Primary qualifiers are location, and time. Secondary qualifiers or “pointers” are things like tracked keywords in posted content. Both criteria are of equal importance and work together like chisel and hammer. Filtering by geographical location alone is effective but if you’re not careful, you can take too much off and miss a discovery simply because you were looking in the wrong space.

Let’s say that we’re interested in men and women between the ages of X and Y who are frequently present within a V mile radius of location Z. They must show interest in W and spend $U on Q products every T. That’s a good start. Now let’s go to town:

Publicly Available Data

Foursquare API (geographical analysis)
GoWalla API (geographical analysis)
Facebook API (demographic, social indexing)
Twitter API (interest analysis)
Blippy API (spending analysis)
…

Privately Available Data

Shared geo-locational information collected from the network of privately owned websites.

Some API assisted number crunching later we have information:

Who are our targets and who are their associates?
Where do they frequent?
What do they do at those locations?
When are they at those locations?
How mobile are our targets?
What methods of transportation do they use? (e.g., walkers vs. drivers)
When are they most vocal about Q products?
…

You’ve probably already guessed who this information would be priceless to. Why spend money advertising your product to 1,000 people so that 1 of them could buy it? It’s infinitely more cost-effective to just advertise to just that one person.

So far we know the who, and the what, and the how, and the where, and the when, but not why.

Knowledge: what would you do if you could predict the future?

In 2005 Blizzard’s World of Warcraft had an (unplanned) outbreak of a virtual disease. It made CNN! Behavioral researchers were fascinated with how players reacted when their in-game cities succumbed to the plague. The scientists were hoping to use the data to make predictions on how a real-life plague would spread through cities if there ever was an outbreak.

It was fascinating to them because they never had access to so much verifiable data on human behavior. This was 2005, before check-ins, and Blippy, and HTML 5 with the geo-locational component. What could the data give these researchers today?

Now that we have the information, we can search for the underlying conditions as to what makes people behave in the way that they do. Then we can make predictions as to how people would react when conditions A, B, and C are introduced within a V mile radius of location Z.

Micro: An individual of D years of age, of C gender, residing at D, working at E, and frequenting F in the after hours spends G on product H every I. On days J and K this individual is most likely to spend >=L on product H. On days J and K this individual is most likely to take the route A1A2A3A4A5.

Is there a co-relation between the route A1-A5 and product H? We cannot say with certainty because the chance for coincidence is too high. So we go “macro” and look at similar individuals. Are there statistical hot spots between A1-A5? If other individuals are producing the same behavior, what is the cause? Can we find other routes that could emit the same result if cause is replicated. Do we need the route at all?

Wisdom: we now know the who, what, where, when, and now hopefully have a guess as to why. Now we need to apply the knowledge to test our predictions. We must make predictions and execute on them while monitoring the results closely. What we learn from acting on our guesses is wisdom. Wisdom gives us the ability to say the following:

With an L degree of certainty, we can predict that introducing variable M into environment N would produce an O number of P.

I’ve never heard an online advertiser use those words, have you?

Would you be interested in a service that makes all of the above happen? Let me know here!

Know Thy Customer

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 22:14:00 -0800

This is a spin-off from tonight’s Startup Chat (thestartupchat.com) by Hiten Shah (@hnshah) on “Getting Early Customers”.

I’ll try keep this on a macro-scale as I do not wish to go into specific intricacies of B2B vs B2C.

At one point of time I was going after a couple of hundred local restaurant owners. Restaurants I was targeting were selected on the following criteria:

Located in the specific geographical area I was after.
Independent or belonging to a local holding organization (not a chain).
Has a Twitter account.

These three criteria had allowed me to narrow down my “shopping” list from thousands to just a few hundred. This was my first qualifier. The last criterion was already telling me that these restaurants would understand my pitch marginally faster: this made a huge difference for what I did next.

The second filter required researching each restaurant to narrow down the list even further.

Is the owner a cook, an entrepreneur, an investor?
- Does he travel?
- Is he around much?
- How hard is he to get a hold of?
- Does he answer his own calls?
What’s the management team like?
- Do they wear aprons or ties?
- Is this their only venture?
- What have they worked on in the past?
Who is the clientele?
- Age?
- Financial situation?
- Place of residence?
- Technical savvy?

This narrowed things down to about a dozen hard targets. I called them “crushes”. After a couple more qualifiers I went to town. I researched every single employee in the company with a public profile. Engaged the restaurant’s corporate Twitter account, engaged people they engaged on Twitter (their clients), engaged the journalists that tended to favor these establishments, engaged their fans and colleagues, engaged their bosses, engaged their partners, engaged their competitors, engaged their investors, engaged every single person who mattered.

I knew the restaurant’s business inside out down to a point where I could precisely predict where the upper management would be at any given time on any given day. Oftentimes it felt like I knew what was going on in their company better than they did.

And then I carried out precision strikes. To any outside person they may have appeared random: a late night e-mail, a stray mention on Twitter, a casual phone call - all were carried out in just the right place at just the right moment to make all the difference. The restaurants took notice every time. :)

To summarize, make a list of your crushes and get to know them better than they know themselves before you even pick up the phone.

First post!

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:30:23 -0800

Hey everyone! First post, I guess I’ll send a shout out to all the service providers: MediaTemple (hosting), Hover (domain), and of course Tumblr (platform).

Heading to Mobile Monday down in Palo Alto in just a few.