Nice observation (and diagram) about the greater value contrast on the right side.
Note also there is greater saturation contrast on the left side. (I'm not sure how this effects aesthetics.) You've inspired me to create a corresponding diagram:)
You should use a measure of chroma (CIELAB C*, the C from CIECAM's JCh, Munsell's "chroma", etc.), rather than HSB/HSV "saturation", as the latter is not really meaningful from a human visual perception standpoint. CIELAB isn't ideal for this, but it's easy to compute:
Respectfully, you're too quick to dismiss saturation. Unless you have a color very close to either white or black, decreasing saturation makes the color more gray, and increasing saturation makes the hue more vibrant/noticeable.
In our example, balancing the saturation of the left colors makes a meaningful perceptual difference (again, I'm not saying anything about aesthetics).
Yeah, but "saturation" as you're using it is arbitrary, based on HSL or HSV, which are extremely simple transformations of RGB space, which means that it's based on the (arbitrary) choice of R, G, and B primaries for your screen. HSL/HSV were developed because computer hardware of the 1970s couldn't do large lookup tables or complex math with any kind of reasonable performance. There is really no excuse for them to persist to 2009, and that they are still being baked into specs is something of a travesty. They're essentially pre-20th century color theory pseudo-science, resurrected because anything better was too computationally expensive 35 years ago.
What you're looking for (to be perceptually meaningful, based on real psychometric data) is something like the "chroma" of the Munsell Color System. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system
Despite seeming a little jargon heavy, I was able to distill out few useful ideas.
For example, say you're considering a cool new CAPTCHA for your registration page. The article would advise doing an "A/B split test" before phasing out the old CAPTCHA.
Such a test would involve creating an alternate registration page with the new CAPTCHA, and randomly directing x% of users to the alternate page. You could then obtain registration completion % from both groups, which would drive your decision to switch to fully switch to the new CAPTCHA.
I signed up to become an expert using my twitter account: nice seemless integration.
Next I added some profile info and hit the save button. The save registered, but I was left on the edit profile page. It felt like I was left hanging: what do I do now? You should funnel the user back (or at least show a prominent link) to another area of the site.
After listing useful advice he's received over the years, the author appropriately offers some critial meta-advice: write down (and analyze) advice that you find interesting in order to put it into practice.
The "visual tongue radar" (allows psuedo vision via an electrical impulse grid on the tongue) interface is intriguing. The reporter describes:
"Thinking back on it, I don't remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I'd seen them with my eyes."
This article reminds me of a 2003 story (that made the cover of Wired) about a prototype brain implant artificial vision system and its hopeful Canadian patient, Jens Naumann. Here's a link: http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/sight/story3.html.
Does anyone know the eventual outcome of Jen's story? I can't find any follow-up stories about him.
The tongue interface seems like a less invasive alternative to Jen's system; although, you probably can't speak while it's active.
Dobelle died a few years ago. The FDA would never give approval for the experimental surgeries so he ended up moving his operations to Portugal. There were only a handful of patients that ever had this procedure done, Jens and Cheri Robertson that I know of. Dobelle's company was supposed to provide life-long support for Jens and Robertson but that has ended. The company ran out of funding within the last 2 years. Cheri's equipment no longer works, and she had to send it to one of the technicians who helped design it personally to try and have it fixed. I'm not sure if that has ever happened.
Cheri has had continuous problems with the implants since they were done. Her's never healed correctly and she has constantly been leaking blood and brain fluids from one of the cortical shunts.
In a recent interview where Cheri met Jans in person, he has been having many problems with his implants over the years and is thinking about having another surgery to have it removed. His equipment had stopped working several years ago and was never repaired. Overall, he ultimately said he was disappointed with the entire thing and probably would not do it again. Cheri remain(ed|s) more optimistic, but currently there is no long-term plan for continued improvement or support for the patients that underwent this experiment.
Thanks for responding. Based on the lack of follow up press, I had suspected less than hoped for results. Jens and Cheri were courageous for volunteering, and hopefully their data can be used to someday improve the technology.
Possibly, since I don't use anything else I don't know (except in a virtual machine). I get the impression however that the firefox people spend a lot of time optimizing for MacOS and Windows that they don't spend on Linux for some reason.
