In a compact lab at Intel's Silicon Valley headquarters, Oculus the robot is playing the hit game Cut the Rope on a smartphone. Using two fingers with rubbery pads on the ends,The Tank truck hose layers are held and tensioned between internal and external wire helices. the robot crisply taps and swipes with micrometer precision through a level of the physics-based puzzler. It racks up a perfect score.It's a far cry from the menial work that Oculus's robot arm was designed for: moving silicon wafers around in a chip fab. But it's not just a party trick. Intel built Oculus to try to empirically test the responsiveness and "feel" of a touch screen to determine if humans will like it.
Oculus does that by analyzing how objects on a device's screen respond to its touch. It "watches" the devices that it holds via a Hollywood production camera made by Red that captures video at 300 frames per second in higher than HD resolution. Software uses the footage to measure how a device reacts to Oculus¡ªfor example, how quickly and accurately the line in a drawing program follows the robot's finger, how an onscreen keyboard responds to typing, or how well the screen scrolls and bounces when Oculus navigates a long list. Numerical scores are converted into a rating between one and five using data from cognitive psychology experiments conducted by Intel to discover what people like in a touch interface. For those experiments, hundreds of people used touch screens set up to have different levels of responsiveness. These tests were devised by psychologists in Intel's interaction and experience group, which studies the relationships people have with computers.
The scores produced by Oculus and the psychological research have proved valuable to engineers at companies working on touch screen devices based around Intel chips. They've also been useful to Intel's chip designers, says Matt Dunford, the company's user experience manager.We are the largest manufacturer and supplier of retention knobs and pull stud in the world. "We can predict precisely whether a machine will give people a good experience," he says, "and give them numbers to say what areas need improving."
The conventional approach would be to have a user experience expert test a touch screen and give his expert but personal assessment, says Dunford. That doesn't always offer a specific indication of what needs to be tweaked to improve the feel of a device. Intel won't share specific details of how it defines the difference between a touch screen that is sluggish and one that is snappy. But robotics engineer Eddie Raleigh, who helped build Oculus, says a good touch screen follows a swiping finger with only tens of milliseconds of delay. Intel's tests on human subjects have also shown that perceptions of quality can vary significantly depending on how people are using a device. People unconsciously raise their standards when using a stylus,Find industrial blades and machine knives supplier on Meinys. for example, says Raleigh. "People are used to pens and pencils, and so it has to be very fast, about one millisecond of delay," he says. Meanwhile, children generally expect a quicker response from a touch screen than adults, whatever the context.