Prosocial Augmented Reality: Celebrating Youth Achievement Where you look matters. Media producers count eyeballs and show you what you will watch. Let’s celebrate achievement, such as the fifth grade chorus from Staten Island, instead of spending our time and money consuming media about outliers, like LeBron James’ basketball contract, or irresponsibility and bad behavior, like Lindsay Lohan’s substance problems and jail sentence. It's time we started exercising our power through viewing choice and putting the powers of emerging media technologies to work promoting the behaviors we want to see in the media for our kids to emulate--not those we can't help but see or wish we hadn't. Let's use the excitement and engagement of emerging technologies—such as augmented reality—for prosocial ends. We are long overdue to take some responsibility for the media content we choose to support. Let your eyeballs, remotes and wallets do the talking instead of your … [Read more...]
How Media Psychology Contributes to Ergonomics
I received the following thoughtful question: Human factors are investigated under the scientific discipline called Ergonomics for comprehending human cognition, or the brain system, in order to design information systems within human factor limitations. How are ergonomics and media psychology related? Human physiology and cognition are obviously central issues to ergonomics and they take into account human development across the lifespan from that perspective. Media psychology also looks at the experiential aspects of human interaction with objects and environments across the lifespan. It extends the usability to the perceptions of self and self-reflection, such as, identity, self-efficacy (competence), engagement and flow (in contrast to attention), persuasion, qualitative perceptions of aesthetics, and attribution or the meaning we give to our interactions. For example: Did this experience make me feel competent or incompetent? Did I feel able to make a good … [Read more...]
I’m ready for my iPhone 4; so is junaio Glue
I'm still waiting for my iPhone 4 to ship. I do have some trepidations because 1) I hate to be a guinea pig with the first generation of any technology, and 2) I'm hearing stories about AT&T problems (how can a phone designed for AT&T have problems with their network? Should I have waited for the Verizon version?). Nevertheless, curiosity and apps like Junaio Glue pushed me over the edge and I put in the order at the end of June when they released. The best thing about being a media psychologist is that we can justify pretty much any technology purchase. junaio Glue combines geo-location features with camera recognition to improve the accuracy of information delivery. It won't be long before we see AR popping up (pun-intended) to support all kinds of marketing and information services, not just those who can invest big bucks. Developers can create their own junaio Glue channels because metaio has an Open API. You can print out the junaio Glue man, download … [Read more...]
