Usability testing and evaluation provide insight into how users will likely interact with a particular system. Frequently usability testing and evaluation are used as part of a process whose goal is to modify a system to become more efficient and satisfying to use. In the case of virtual reality systems and virtual worlds in particular, there seems to have been relatively little published on the use of usability testing and the learning’s from that testing. In this blog we look at applying low cost usability testing as part of a process to improve the usability of a new virtual world interface (Nortel’s web.alive). We also discuss a new variation of traditional usability testing designed specifically for testing group interactions.
Too often it seems that our organisations, institutions and nations view learning as an individual process with beginnings and ends, best separated from the rest of our activities and a consequence of teaching - a binary zero or one process where we’re expected to be either learning or not.
It has been a particularly busy and exciting time for the web.alive team. Just a week into the new year we were heading down to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to unveil our first customer installation of web.alive with our customer Lenovo. After doing some pre-launch interviews and demonstrations with analysts and press we were hoping that our the two announcements we were going to make would help officially launch web.alive to the world.
The Immersive Internet opens the door to things simply not possible using alternative methods and at the same time Immersive and Engaged go hand-in-hand. It’s hard not to like it (or agree) when Driver concludes “While the adoption of the Immersive Internet in the enterprise is still in the seeding stage as of late 2008, it will become mainstream within five years. By this mean that it will have a significant installed base within Global 1000 companies and large public sector organizations and at least a few sucessful large-scale implementations.”
Brent November 20, 2008 in: News
As a Gen-Xer (admittedly close to the baby boomer edge) my first introduction to web.alive technology was in January of 2008. Initial impression; “this is cool stuff, but can you actually sell it”. As an opportunity presented itself to join the team shortly thereafter I was faced with a career defining moment especially with the [...]
The interest level in web.alive is heating up as we watch a world in an extreme economic crunch while teams are more diversified and globally extended. Recently Chief Architect Arn Hyndman sat down with the Ottawa Citizen to discuss the vision behind web.alive a little more thoroughly. You can read the story at http://tinyurl.com/proj-chainsaw
Paul Mcdonagh-Smith - Director Learning Applications
Monday morning, Central London - It could have been something Arn and the guys had put together. Standing on the steps outside the conference centre I was looking through the rain at Westminster Abbey in front of me, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament (of HP Sauce fame) on [...]
A while back, Christian Renaud posted an interesting question “Riddle me this…” on his blog:
Fast forward to the office of the future, the virtual office version. You have packetized spatial audio. You have user created content. You have streaming video and powerpoints and presence information. You have ever-changing mixes of synchronous and asynchronous traffic types all over walls and tables of your virtual headquarters. This is much more bandwidth intensive than Warcraft, and if you are having a staff or funding meeting, the voice/video latency is arguably more critical than simple ‘the dragon killed you before you hit it with your sword’ telemetry data […]
There is a really great article in the London Telegraph on the rate of change we are seeing with respect to the Internet today and specifically on the move from the 2.0 version of the web that we are starting to take for granted to the web 3.0.
Two of the facts that jumped out at [...]
