Direct Manipulation and Virtual Environments

“Direct Manipulation and Virtual Environments” Please respond to the following:

Your software development company has been contracted to build a tool that will manage user accounts and rights in an Active Directory environment. One of your developers tells you that he wants the tool to make use of direct manipulation. A second developer argues that a command line structure would be a better and more secure approach. Take a stand on this argument, providing at least three positives of each approach, and then make a decision for this project and support it.

Direct Manipulation refers to a human–computer interaction style which involves continuous representation of objects of interest and rapid, reversible, and incremental actions and feedback. . A good example of a direct manipulation interface is the resizing of a graphical shape, such as a rectangle, by dragging its corners or edges with a mouse. On the other hand, a CLI (command line interface) is an interface in which the user responds to a visual prompt by typing in a command on a specified line, receives a response back from the system, and then enters another command, and so forth. In other words, the user has to feed the command to invoke an application

Both of the approaches have its pros and cons, and of course, the approach selected will depend of the actual purpose of the application. In this case, an interface to control account rights in an active directory environment will benefit the most of a direct manipulation environment. Active directory it’s geared with a direct manipulation environment, you can visually see what is happening and you can visually display any rights or pertinent content to each individual account, hence a direct manipulation interface for a managing tool is its best approach. Regardless, here are some pros both approaches:

Describe virtual and augmented reality. Suggest a way in which this technology could be used in the future; either to improve a current process / procedure or create a new process / procedure. Provide an example of your suggested use of the technology.

Virtual reality is an artificial environment that is created with software and presented to the user in such a way that the user suspends belief and accepts it as a real environment. On a computer, virtual reality is primarily experienced through two of the five senses: sight and sound. Augmented reality is the integration of digital information with the user’s environment in real time. Unlike virtual reality, which creates a totally artificial environment, augmented reality uses the existing environment and overlays new information on top of it . The main difference is that augmented reality uses technology to enhance real life, while virtual reality is a completely different environment to real life.

Medicine is a big scenario were both virtual and augmented reality is been used, and should be used to enhance and evolve the industry. For virtual reality, it can be use to create scenarios were doctors can practice and mimic surgery procedures in order to enhance their skills or use it as a training environment for more inexperience surgeons. Another place it could be used is to provide an alternate environment for mentally challenge patients in order to channel frustrations, fears or any other way of mental disturbance; in other word, use it as therapy. For augmented reality, it would be great if were able to tap into this space on prosthetics. Find a way were we can develop a procedure were patients could try out and use any prospective prosthetics for limb replacement. Sometimes, prosthetics are not compatible or are difficult or not appropriate for all situations, been able to provide samples that patients can trial run will be a great leap.

References:

Kwon, B. C., Waqas, J., Niklas, E., & Ji, S. (2011). Direct manipulation through surrogate objects. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (pp. 627-636). West Lafayette, IN.

Rouse, M. (2005, April). Command Line Interface (CLI). Retrieved from Techtarget: http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/definition/command-line-interface-CLI

Rouse, M. (2015, May). Virtual Reality. Retrieved from Techtarget: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/virtual-reality

Rouse, M. (2016, February). Augmented Reality. Retrieved from Techtarget: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/augmented-reality-AR