Friday 12 October 2012

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.

1 comment:

  1. Good video example but you could have embedded it to save visiting another website. Think about this in future as it may not encourage the use of the video by only having a link. (HCI consideration here...)
    You need to identify the impact of HCI in deskilling the workforce and the impact on developing nations.

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