Split Screen UI

Yesterday, I had a meeting with Owen Otto and Andrea Moed in the city, at a small nondescript cafe called Sugarlump (2862 24th St). Owen and Andrea are now graduating from the School of Information at UCB, moving on to jobs on UI design in Google and Yahoo respectively.

Their Master's project involved using the split mouse framework provided by MSRI (Joyojeet's project at TIER) and developing it into a split-screen UI to allow for an enhanced interaction between the users, the target audience in this case being children attending schools supported by the Azim Premji Foundation (APF).

Owen and Andrea implemented different prototypes, and tested these on the children when they visited Bangalore earlier this year. It was most interesting to learn about their experiences with the children at APF, and what they learned from them.

The primary prototype was as follows:
There were 4 mice connected to a single laptop, each mouse to be controlled by a single child. There were two teams, say Team A and Team B. The screen was split in half, with Team A controlling the left half and Team B controlling the right. The kids in each team would take turns answering questions that showed up on their side of the screen. Questions were multiple-choice, with pictures of animals that the kids had to identify. There was a points system based on the number of attempts required to answer a question correctly.

Interesting aspects of the game were:
- Teaming up, as well as competition, as opposed to a game with only teaming up (not enough incentive to perform well) or only competition (no collaboration).
- The points system indicated obviously which team did better, but it was not trivial to see that a correct answer on first attempt got more points than a correct answer on third attempt.
- Kids understood well that when their mouse indicated an X, it was not their turn.
- Matt's idea: for the benefit of kids between turns, it would make sense to add information such as the picture of the animal their team-mate clicked on incorrectly. Basically, to add more to the game for spectators.
- Starting with a screen with a color to indicate whose turn it is first is a good idea.

These were the highlights of our meeting. I had added a link to their project page below.