through out the semester, I worked on many projects and was constantly thinking about the meaning to interaction. At first I understand interaction simply as the process of performing and action and getting some form of feedback in response. But after my midterm projects process of prototyping and user testing, I realized that even though interaction is the cycle of performing an action and getting feedback, it was not enough. As a designer you have to distinguish between good and bad interaction, this is when I decided that a good interaction requires the design to take a form natural to the human instinct and should guide the user on to the track of the interaction that you intended them to. This evolution of understanding was crucial to shaping my approach to these kind of projects and will continue to perfect my effort of creating user friendly interaction.
Currently I am planning on creating a interactive game for my final project, so I looked into previous game consoles as my inspiration. One that does not align with my definition of interaction would be the Sony playstation. Even though it is a very popular and successful game console, yet it fails to meet up with my standards of a interactive gaming experience. As its controller is using the joystick+button set up. I believe that commonly used controllers like the joystick, buttons, and even mouse and keyboard are very good for accurately transmitting the users desired controls into the machine to achieve a stable communication between the human and the code. But as accurate as it can be, it is not a natural way humans interact with objects, no one was born with the ability to use the mouse and keyboard. This in turn affects the overall interaction experience of the project, the user will always be in the mind set of playing a game rather than reacting to the visuals on the screen naturally out of instinct.
HTC vive, on the other hand, provides a perfectly real and natural experience to the user, the controls are perfectly natural to the user, as it is using sensors to pick up the users hand movement and body movement. The feedback of the machine also contributes to the feeling, as the accuracy of the graphics matches the users, both in terms of frame rate and perspective, the outcome is a experience so real that the user will subconsciously believe what is happening in game.
After examining specific examples of interactions that both lines up, and not line up with my understanding of interaction, I came to the conclusion that my definition of a good interaction is the cycle of giving and receiving information that are both natural to the humans instinct, and accurately matches the expectations of the user. If the feedback is even slightly off from the users expectations, the user will feel uncomfortable, an example would be the lag of frame rates will cause discomfort. Or if the controls are not precise enough, and the code is not giving me the feedback I expected from my input, it will give the user a headache. This is why the difference between expected feedback and actual feedback should be minimal in order to secure a smooth and comfortable interaction.