I think there would be a little bit improvement in my English( I hope so LOL), its obvious because am in UK now. I find it worth coming here to study about User eXperience Engineering (UXE).

I was always desired to study about interesting stuff and voila UXE is very interesting. I find it very challenging especially when it comes to learn about Users who use the system (whatever system from consumer product to computer applications), because people are really different and their perception differs from each other. But there is always few common things across every human regardless of people who are little bit exceptional in few cases. This sound really weird or obvious . For instance, there are musics which everyone likes (e.g those which gets maximum hits on youtube) and few exceptional people say “that music sucks” , people are different across the world in culture, languages, or whatever. But what makes that music so popular or viral ? (You could guess lots of examples for viral musics – “why this kolaveri ?? ” LOL ) there would be something special about the music, either the music which gets people pumped up(happens across the culture) or the lyrics of the music(people who knows that language) is at its best or both together. It is all exiting when I think about these ! It is quiet interesting to learn about what makes people love things, give them satisfaction , they feel the specialty of the thing, hold strong in the memory, sentimental touch , or whatever that make people comfortable.  Apart from these, there are few other stuff like safety , security, ergonomics, usability, simplicity ,how things are easier to understand, easy to follow and so on. There are many other things like methods to do research , get data about users, how to analyse them ,measure them, design , graphics, etc. All together I can call User Experience Engineering.

However, there are several myth about UXE, people usually misunderstand that it is all about designing UI for the applications. But this is just a small component of UXE, there is lot more including the stuff which I said above.

It took me a while learning about implementation of  height map to generate landscapes in Opengl. NEHE production portal is best to learn these stuff. So finally here is the screenshot of my landscape done using opengl program with c++.

Here is my first openGL program. It was very tricky to get things done on openGL api with c++.

The other day, I had so much fun with Xbox 360 with Kinect in a gaming shop! But I never had thought that Microsoft would give away the SDK for non commercial applications. Many things can be done with Kinect SDK, all we need is a Kinect device , Window 7 OS and Visual Studio 2010. To kick start , we can take refer Programming Guide and the SDK can be downloaded from here . Also there are some demos along with code available at MSDN channel9 .

Gesture based human computer  interaction methods can be easily implemented with the help of kinect. However, many such applications are possible with a simple web camera. Applications like Umouse an example for interacting through hand movements, AR toy from SourceBits which is an example for augmented reality using webcam. But Kinect make everything even more simpler with its infrared lazer projection and a camera together helps to convert the video data into 3D form, also it captures the Z – index of the object , i mean the distance between the device and the controller/object/user . Continue Reading »

What’s that Second Life (SL)? Well, a virtual world were people never die if they jump from the sky but feasibly they can fly! What else? People can virtually laugh, dance, cry, fight, ride on weird virtual animals, can change cloths, can get undressed, <<censored>>, can do anything they want. In short, good people do good things, bad people do bad things.

I was aware about Second Life a few years ago. It was during my college days, and poor me, I had a bad machine which didn’t met SL’s requirements. But I used to play There.com; another virtual world which is not exists anymore.  Okay, let me start sharing my SL experience.

Actually I brought a new laptop with damn cool hi-fi, super-duper, incredible, super cool, super-fast hardware configuration. This actually exceeded the SL requirements!! Cool huh!! Yes, I able play SL with 75 FPS even in full graphics configuration!

When I first time logged in, I didn’t find myself in the game but just an Egg. I able type something and then I typed, “where is me?” I got reply from someone saying “you are loading dude”. Then I waited for a few mins but I wasn’t loaded fully, and in the mean time I explored the features and navigations and found the graphics preference. Continue Reading »