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Smart Paper

Smart Paper is an upcoming technology that produces e-paper. These electronic sheets are very lightweight, flexible, energy-efficient, and use e-ink to display words, images, and videos in color.
The e-paper is designed to receive content over a wireless network, and has a simple touch command that allows users to scroll through the pages on screen.

This technology first of all is extremely eco freindly because no longer would trees need to be cut down to make paper if we have smart paper. Smart paper is made up of half a million transistors. Also with it using e-ink, which the amazon kindle uses, the stress on the eyes would be very little as well which is quite useful for people wanting to read a large page full of text.

This technology has already been adapted into a watch which is a smart watch that uses a smart paper for the screen. This was funded on kickstarter and gained more that $10 million. One main feature about this watch was that it could connect to the users smartphone without having to take the phone out of the users pocket to use it. This is because of the e-papers wireless connection. Also while using the e-paper there is a 30fps refresh rate which, if the user has a clock screen that has a moving second hand, can drain power really quickly.

Society

This e-paper watch can help improve the usability of phones in a way that cars can sense keys. Instead of having to rumage around for a phone to check a text that the user just got they can look at their wrist and have their text messages there as well as the music and contacts from their phone.
For people with sight issues the e-ink used for the paper which puts a lot less stress on the eyes. It also has quite big buttons and text to help with people that can't see very well.
The complexity if this device is not alot because on the phone there is an app that connects it to the watch and the connection will sort out all of the data. The interface is very simple as there is not much too it, there is an up and down button to scroll through things and an ok button.

Economy

This technology will not do much to the economy but it can increase productivity of the standard worker that uses his or her phone a lot. Because when a person takes their phone out of their pocket then that is wacting time and if they do it a lot in can be an inconvenience. If they just need to check their wrist that is a simple 1 second task which can inprove the workload that a person does.

Culture

E-paper can be used in many ways with computers, for example they could be used for presentations. Instead of printing off screenshots to show a person in a presentation the user could just place it on some e-paper and show the full presentation at its finest to get better results. This could also be used in education because in stead of big displays at the front that take up time and money to set up, e-paper could be bought for everyone in that class and the presentations can be put onto each piece of paper to make presentations more efficient and more effective.

This is not technology that can affect 3rd world countries. It is mostly designed for business and education purposes which there are not that much of in developing countries who would not have computers anyway.

Culture

Culture
HCI affects culture by changing the way that we use technology. It has done this through multiple ways inluding touch screens and voice commands. Touch screens have allowed people to create their own UI on phones by letting them place the apps and items they want in the places they want on the screen making it easier on them to use. Touch screens have their negatives in that they can be over sensetive and the person could open something they do not want to.

Voice commands have affected culture in small ways, this is because a phone like the iphone (which has voice control) is well known and used by many people and when people see others using it they would also want to use it because it looks fun to do. Voice controls can also affect many other cultures like music. For example lights and fireworks can be set to go off at specific lyrics.
Voice controls can also affect the culture of gaming by allowing people to give commands to their units in RTS (real time stratergy) games, doing this makes for much more fluid gameplay and will allow some players to be better than others and make them want to be able to use the voice controls. There are some negative aspects of voice controls in HCI, for example some people may have different accents or a lisp so the voice control will take what the person says and thing that it was something different. This means that those people will not be able to use them and be at a disadvantage to others.

Voice controls in the culture of gaming can be shown in this video about the first ever voice controlled game, Tom Clancys End War.

Also cultural appliances like Smartphones have become even more popular in developing countries including Africa which has had a massive rise in the population who have smartphones with internet access. This means that things like voice commands will be in poorer countries quite soon which is really interesting because even people in poorer countries will be able to do their shopping online. This also effects the economy because they are getting more sales in a wider variety of places.

Economy

The economy is being changed by HCI as companies want to increase productivity.
The posotives of having machines to do this is that is can be cheaper for the business to maintain rather than employees, the accident rate would be lowered because machines do not have accidents.
However these can make people jobless which would slightly ruin the economy because these jobless people will not have any money to spend.

An example of this happening is a supermarket self service system. These are machines that allow the customer to scan and pack their own items at their own pace. This can be better because moving at the customers pace is more important to them as well as it being very cheap to run. However that system cost someone their job which may make the supermarket richer but could reduce the economy because less people are spending. Also seeing as they are small mahines each manned till could be replaced with 3 self services meaning more people could get through the supermarket at a time rather than queuing.

Productivity can be increased because of these self service machines, this is because the pace that a customer can get through the till can be a lot faster than a slow cashier. Also the machines might be more approachable than some random stranger. Also with the HCI being quite simple and easy to use it has proven that people without training can use these machines which means there is no need to teach people how to use them.

 

There are a couple of issues with this method though, some people may have a disability that could affect the persons sight which could lead to them having a lot of trouble with the screens. Also the customer may have a disability that makes them unable to pach their shopping. Both of these things are preventable by a cashier.

 

Having the self service machines in a supermarket also gives the place a more varied working environment which can be a good things because the surroundings would always be changing because of these new machines that are being installed.

Society

HCI is very important in society because it improves the efficiency of how we live our lives. Smart phones are the best example of this because the majority of people have one and use it very often. Smart phones need to have a productive and efficient HCI which is why a lot of them always have a clock at the top right of the screen. It is simple features like this that make smart phones a lot more HCI freindly.

Another feature about smart phones that helps HCI is being able to turn it on its side to help with being able to press the buttons on the keyboard with ease rather than missing a bunch of times trying to press the right button. This is very helpful to everyone because of how hard it is to press the small buttons.

Also the way that smart phones are layed out helps improve usability. This is done by having the icons with the title of the application underneath in rows of 4 to show easily what icon goes to what application. Lastly some Smart phones have a feature that allows the users most contacted contacts to be callable or textable by the press of a button by having their picture and name on the main screen.

However this technology has its flaws, for example it may be friendly to all types of users with how it handles but some of its features are not so usable by everybody. An example of this is the iphone voice command system called siri. The issue with this system is that it can not recognize alot of voices. An example of this is that it cant understand scottish people. This shows that this feature of the iphone is not very HCI freindly at all.