Lab Session 4: Data & Tactility

Data Analysis and Visualisation

No web-based experiments this week. Instead, we’ll have a look at some of the data from previous weeks. For this you’ll use the notebook below. Click the badge to open it on Google’s Colab service.

You’ll need a (free) Google account to use this. You may get a warning about the notebook not being written by Google — obviously this is true, but you should run it anyway. Don’t you trust me?

You can run the notebook as is, but you won’t be able to save any changes. If you want to do that, you should save a copy of the notebook into your own Google Drive and work on that copy instead.

The notebook is coded in Python, so if you’re familiar with that you should be reasonably at home. If not, read through the notebook anyway — there’s lots of supporting text, and the code is all written for you, so you should at least be able to run it and see what it does.

As ever, if you have any problems or questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Discussion: Tactility in user interfaces

In between, if people have the time and inclination, we can have a bit of a discussion about the use of touch perception in UIs.

• How is touch typically used in today’s software interfaces?
• What about in hardware?
• How does it compare to the use of audio we discussed last week?
• Can you think of any interesting special cases?
• If you have any concrete examples, please bring them along!

Discussion: Coursework

The individual coursework assignment was also released this week. You are encouraged to read through the brief before this week’s practical. There will be an opportunity to discuss what is expected of you and how you might approach it. If you have questions, this would be a good time to ask.