Click here to get the NASA-TLX tool at the Intel AppUp Store. The Intel AppUp center is a service that allows you to browse a catalog of applications for purchase or free download to your netbook or other personal computing device. Applications are available for many different categories including social, education, entertainment, communications etc. To [...]

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) has put together a Human Factors Prize aimed at recognizing excellence in human factors/ergonomics research. This is a new competition aimed at recruiting authors to publish in one of the top human factors journals aptly named Human Factors. Submissions must be unpublished manuscripts based on the chosen theme for [...]

As you can see in the above screenshot, Amazon has left out the Log Out button from their header and main page. It took me way too long to locate a place where I could log out of my account. Turns out you have to click on the Your Account link at the right. It [...]

This website demonstrates what an interface that does not require mouse clicking could look like. I wouldn’t call this a research experiment exactly, but the developers do collect usage data and apparently they record the mouse movements for all users who visit the site. I think this is an important topic to explore, especially with [...]

The University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies seems to be involved in a lot of really interesting virtual reality and avatar research. I’ve included an example of what they’re working on below: Sergeant Star The video below shows a demonstration of USC’s Sergeant Star Immersive Demonstration. The avatar is life-sized, and they say [...]

I was playing around with designing some sort of symbol to represent the field of Human Factors and came up with the crest above. I quite like it, but I know it needs some work. We’ll call this version 0.0.1. There was a method to my madness during the design stages and you can read [...]

This is a cool Flash dictonary based on Princeton University’s opensource  WordNet. The developers describe it as a type of neural net, but I look at it as more of a word map where you can see words that are related to your original ‘seed’ word. The use of color, line thickness and distance, and [...]

“SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.” Sixthsense, a brilliant example of augmented reality, was designed by Pranav Mistry, a researcher at MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group. Watch the video above, or the fairly recent [...]

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel. [...]

I just finished developing an Online version of the NASA-TLX (http://www.nasatlx.com) and thought I would share. The procedure behind the NASA-TLX was developed by the Human Performance Group at the NASA Ames Research Center. The goal of the TLX is to help researchers gather people’s subjective cognitive workload assessments when participating in various tasks. The [...]