good@baviki.enet.dec.com (03/01/90)
Someone asked for introductions of people working in this area, so here's mine: I'm Michael Good. I'm with Digital Equipment Corporation's Software Usability Engineering group at Spit Brook Road in Nashua, New Hampshire. Our group's focus is on making our products more useful, usable, and appropriate for our customers. I'm leading a small, distributed research project into what we call Presence, or Multi-Sensory I/O. Presence is the quality that we're looking for - the feeling of working on your problem rather than working on the computer. This is similar to the ideas of transparency, first-personness, and direct engagement that have been around for a long time in the usability area. Multi-sensory I/O is the technology that we're exploring to enhance presence. We're investigating how to support the senses of vision, touch, and hearing in the use of computers, using current technology like the VPL Research EyePhone and DataGlove, force-feedback joysticks, and MIDI synthesizers and samplers. Our focus is on using participative design methods to work together with some of our customers to see how this technology might meet their needs in the future. So far this newsgroup has provided me with a lot of good ideas. Let's continue sharing ideas so we can progress further together than we would separately. Michael Good Good@Baviki.Enet.Dec.Com