By Yuil Tripathee (650 7050 3480)
It was a wonderful experience, to say the least. The class began with Prof. Priyakorn Pusawiro introducing us to “SIGGRAPH” - Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, hosted by ACM (Association of Computing Machinery). We realized that it is one of the greatest and oldest computer graphics conferences bringing animators, gamers, graphics designers, and other stakeholders together concerned with user experience and user interfaces. SIGGRAPH 2022 was organized in Vancouver, Canada on August 8 - 11 and more details can be found here at their website: https://s2022.siggraph.org/.
Also, I was delighted to know that SIGGRAPH ASIA 2024 is going to be organized in Bangkok, Thailand where Prof. Priyakorn Pusawiro is co-chairing the Extended Reality Program committee.
Then, we were introduced to class overview, the OBEM (Outcome Based Education Measurement), and the points are based on skills evaluations observed from assignments and exercises. The course instruction will be based on the designer’s perspective. We will be going through lab exercises and case studies throughout the course.
MIRO is an online collaboration environment based on a multi-user whiteboard. Here’re the use cases where I find this app useful:
Brainstorming sessions
As the whiteboard provided for the online collaboration works in real-time very smoothly, it can be used for remote collaboration very productively. Also, the tool provided lots of useful pre-existing templates so we don’t have to build them from the scratch and get right into our desired agendas.
Basic graphics work
When you don’t want to use sophisticated graphics design tools like Photoshop, or Affinity Design suite, MIRO is a great option to get the hands-on job done!
Miro screenshot during an active session
I highly recommend alternatives like Figma, Invision Studio, Sketch, and Adobe XD in order to work on UX/UI design-related works. MIRO is very limited on such tasks. To recall from my past experiences, Figma provided the best productivity and quality deliverable outcome even over the traditionally practiced solutions like Adobe Illustrator. It easily outperformed other alternatives by its benefits while using it on a self-project or taking testimonials from the team members of a group project who had extensively worked on design-related areas.
<aside> 💡 TL:DR; The technologies, innovations and the application should be of benefit to humanity. Better experience means better value. It’s that simple.
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So, as we talk about AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality), MR (Mixed Reality), and even XR (Extended Reality), we must keep human understanding at the core when developing applications for people/users. UX/UI plays a heavy part here to understand user psychology. As the user is the central basis upon which the application is to be developed, user feedback is of utmost necessity to ensure the quality software or application is being developed.
Fig: Image to clarify VR vs AR vs MR
This course used to be an elective course, and the notion that the understanding of the user’s perspective and software engineering process (including usability of the product outcome), including the human-centric design of the application should be one of the main learning objectives, the course is shifted as a mandatory course in the freshmen year.
When you build a product/service, you must know your user’s psychology.
<aside> 💡 Focus on content at first, rendering content as second, and the platform as third. (in college)
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