2.

6 
PHYSICAL CONTROLS, SENSORS
AND SPECIAL DEVICES  

Fuzzy Topology with Human Centric Computing

PCS743(SPR-2021/W-10199)

Dr. Aqil Burney

 Input & output devices:
physical controls, sensors, etc.

special displays and gauges

touch, feel, smell
physical controls environmental
and bio-sensing
dedicated displays
□ analogue representations:
■ dials, gauges, lights, etc.

□ digital displays:
■ small LCD screens, LED lights, etc.

□ head-up displays
■ found in aircraft cockpits
■ show most important controls
■ depending on context
Touch, feel, smell
□ touch and feeling important
■ in games … vibration, force feedback
■ in simulation … feel of surgical instruments
■ called haptic devices
□ texture, smell, taste
■ current technology very limited
 physical controls
□ specialist controls needed …
■ industrial controls, consumer
products, etc.

easy-clean
smooth buttons

multi-function
control
large buttons
clear dials

tiny buttons
Example: ATM
All ATMs, even those with touchscreens, also have a set of
physical buttons, usually just below the screen. These
contain number keys along with keys
labelled Cancel, Clear and Enter or OK. When you enter your
PIN, it's always on this mechanical keypad.
Example: BMW iDrive
□ single multi-purpose device for controlling menus
□ haptic feedback: feel small `bumps' for each item
□ makes it easier to select options by feel
□ slides backwards & forwards, rotates
Environment and bio-sensing
□ sensors all around us
■ car lights turn on – small switch on door
■ ultrasound detectors – security, washbasins
■ RFID security tags in shops
■ temperature, weight, location

□ … and even (our own) bodies …

■ iris scanners, body temperature, heart rate, galvanic
skin response, blink rate, goniometry
■ possible applications: emotion recognition (affective
computing), life signal monitoring, etc.
Limitations on interactive performance
Computation bound
■ Computation takes time, causing frustration for the user
Storage channel bound
■ Bottleneck in transference of data between storages
Graphics bound
■ Updating displays requires effort - sometimes helped by
adding a graphics co-processor to take on the burden
Network capacity
■ Many computers networked - shared resources and files,
access to printers etc. - but interactive performance can be
reduced by slow network speed
Finite processing speed
□ Designers tend to assume fast processors, and make
interfaces more and more complicated
□ But problems occur, because processing cannot keep up
with all the tasks it needs to do

■ cursor overshooting because system has buffered

keypresses
■ icon wars - user clicks on icon, nothing happens, clicks on
another, then system responds and windows fly
everywhere

□ Also problems if system is too fast - e.g. help screens

may scroll through text much too rapidly to be read
Next: Interaction
□ Design principles, paradigms, basics
□ Different kinds
■ Text-based, commando languages
■ WIMP and GUIs
■ Natural language
■ Multimodal
■ 3D interaction in VR
■ Agent- and Avatar-based
■ …
 2.7 PAPER: PRINTING AND SCANNING

• 2.7.2 Fonts and page description langages

• 2.7.3 Screen and page
• 2.7.4 Scanners and optical character recognition
2.7.1 Printing

• In this section, we will look at some of the available technology that

exists to get information to and from paper
• So easy to run off many copies of a latter
• All of the popular printing technologies, like screens, build the image
on the paper as a series of dots. This enables, in theory, any character
set or graphic to be printed,
• Dot-matrix printers, Ink-jet and bubble-jet printers , Laser printer
2.7.3 Screen and page

• As nouns the difference between screen and page is that screen is a

physical divider intended to block an area from view, or provide
shelter from something dangerous while page is one of the many
pieces of paper bound together within a book or similar document or
page can be (obsolete) a serving boy – a youth attending a person of
high degree, especially at courts, as a position of honor and education.
• As verbs the difference between screen and page is that screen is to
filter by passing through a screen while page is to mark or number the
pages of, as a book or manuscript or page can be to attend (someone)
as a page.
2.7.4 Scanners and optical character recognition
• Optical character recognition or optical character reader is the
electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten
or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned
document, a photo of a document, a scene-photo or from subtitle
text superimposed on an image.
2.8 MEMORY
• Like human memory, we can think of the computer’s memory as
operating at different levels, with those that have the faster access
typically having less capacity
2.8.1 RAM and short-term memory (STM)
• Most currently active information is held in silicon-chip random
access memory (RAM). Different forms of RAM differ as to their
precise access times, power consumption and characteristics. Typical
access times are of the order of 10 nanoseconds, that is a hundred-
millionth of a second, and information can be accessed at a rate of
around 100 Mbytes (million bytes) per second. Typical storage in
modern personal computers is between 64 and 256 Mbytes.
2.8.2 Disks and long-term memory (LTM)
• There are two main kinds of technology used in disks: magnetic disks
and optical disks. The most common storage media, floppy disks and
hard (or fixed) disks, are coated with magnetic material, like that
found on an audio tape, on which the information is stored.
2.8.3 Understanding speed and capacity