Unreal Tournamnet 2004 and Laser Force

26/07/07 . . . the best day ever

On Thursday the class activity was to play a computer game called Unreal Tournament 2004. We all played against each other and the aim was to shoot as many people as possible. I was quite terrible at it and it made me feel car sick but it was so fun i just kept on playing. Afterwards we took a walk to Laser Force where we played the same game - minus the computer screen. Running through a dark maze shooting laser guns at the others was a very different experience to the online version. This showed us how the filter of the interface plays a huge role in affecting how we experience the content presented.

marimekko.com

Marimekko is a Finnish design company specialising in clothing and textiles. Its website is attractive and slick, displaying the company's catalogue of products. When entering the site you are presented with the display above, but the central yellow graphic fades between different images of various textile designs:


As the images fade out, so do the links which take you to the collection of the designer represented. So if you wait too long, the page changes and it seems that you have to wait for the button to turn up again. However, this is not so because every designer's page has direct links to the other designers' collections.


This page shows s collection of textile designs by Bjorn Dahlstrom. They are presented in a simple, attractive format which is easy to navigate through - basic buttons such as 'next page' and drop down menus to move between different designers and their collections. Each page is formatted similarly making it user friendly.

This site is much less interactive than the likes of the adidas site. Although you choose your own path, the site (to me) acts much more like a window than a mirror. As the site is not so big on interactivity, it does little to reflect the user.
The simple interface is not invisible but it is translucent - displaying information to the user in a one-way transaction.

Windows and Mirrors:

Interaction Design, Digital Art and the Myth of Transparency
(2003) by Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, London


This reading talks about how interfaces shape our experiences of the material presented.
"The most visible, and in some ways the most important, part of any digital application is its interface - the face that the aplication presents to its users."

Bolter offers examples of digital art to illustrate the importance of interface, arguing that it is the interface that defines the whole experience.
Parallels are drawn between digital interfaces and windows and mirrors. The computer screen can be seen as a window, "openning up into a visual world that seems to be behind or beyond."
But when the user begins to interact with the interface (activating buttons and menus) the interface acts more like a mirror, "reflecting the user and her relationship to the computer."
No interface acts solely as the 'window' - it is never completely transparent.

adidas.com

adidas.com

The adidas site is an online gallery for its fashion products. As you go between pages you experience a sense of movement - it feels like you are in a real 3D space. The animations are very impressive with unfolding rooms and photo-quality graphics.

Navigation is not particularly easy. It is difficult to know whether you are going back or forward and this, combined with the large number of pages, makes it easy to get lost. I am unsure whether this is an intentional, 'designed' feature of the interface because although it is a bit annoying it means that you are exposed to much more of the content when you are trying to navigate.

At the top of each page there is a link to a 'site map' which is an unusually boring page. This gives you access to all the pages via named links.



Window or Mirror?

As with most websites adidas.com functions as both a window and a mirror. As a window it allows a view into the adidas range of products.As a mirror it is interactive - the user can navigate around the spatial site and even participate in a digital croquet game. This interaction creates a two-way communication as the computer responds to the users commands.

The interface shapes the way we experience the site. The realistic look of the models and the spaces that they occupy and the way the interface moves you between pages (rooms) creates a surreal 3D affect - pulling the virtual world closer to our physical one. This creates an effective selling point for adidas and a unique experience for the viewer.