ID task – Literature research
The topic of this article is the idea, development and evaluation of the On Board Call, a handheld device for imitating wildlife sounds.
“The On Board Call device is a handheld electronic gestural instrument that synthesises sounds resembling wildlife calls. It is designed to encourage deep listening and personal expression through imitation of natural sounds and as a performance tool.” This is the description of the device by the developer. Rather than playing back recorded wildlife sounds the On Board Call creates an imitation by synthesized sounds. The user creates these sounds with the board through a user interface on the device.
The article spends a lot of time explaining the technicalities of the hardware and software. It does state some reasoning for the choices that have been made, but I would be more interested in the arguments behind the gestures and interface layout. This is what the user interacts with, and will threrefore be critical for their experience. The article does for example not explain how well the ergonomics, learnability or feedback is.
Despite missing information about the argumentation behind the interaction between user and device, the article does explain that user trials have been carried out. It is not completely clear what the results and measures taken after the trials was when it comes to the interface, so this would have been interesting to hear more about.
Overall the project seems interesting, but a natural next step would be to test the interface more. It seems this has been designed out of ease for the producer, not out of usability.
