In September 2014, Oracle Applications User Experience (@usableapps) opened a brand new lab that showcases Oracle’s Cloud Applications, specifically the many innovations that our organization has made to and around Cloud Applications in the past handful of year. We call it the Cloud User Experience Lab, or affectionately, the Cloud Lab. Our team has several… Read More
Category: general
The MagicBand
Editor’s note: Here’s the first post from our new-ish researcher, Tawny. She joined us back in September, just in time for OpenWorld. After her trip to Disney World, she talked eagerly about the MagicBand experience, and if you read here, you know I’m a fan of Disney’s innovative spirit. Enjoy. Planning a Disney World trip… Read More
Before IoT became ‘The’ buzzword, there was M2M (machine to machine). Some industries still refer to IoT as M2M, but overall the term Internet of Things has become the norm. I like the term M2M because it describes better what IoT is meant to do: Machines talking to other machines. This year our team once… Read More
SafeDrop – Part 2: Function and Benefits
SafeDrop is a secure box for receiving a physical package delivery, without the need of recipient to be present. If you recall, it was my team’s project at the AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon earlier this month. SafeDrop is implemented with Intel Edison board at its core, coordinating various peripheral devices to produce a secure receiving product,… Read More
My Joyful Consumption of Data
I love data, always have. To feed this love and to compile data sets for my quantified self research, I recently added the Netatmo Weather Station to the other nifty devices that monitor and quantify my everyday life, including Fitbit Aria, Automatic and Nest. I’ve been meaning to restart my fitness data collection too, after spending most of… Read More
Any Port in a Storm: Novel Ways of Interacting with Our Devices
With smartwatches, sometimes your fingers just aren’t good enough for the task at hand. Fortunately, some ingenious users have found a suitable alternative for when those digits just won’t do: their nose. That thing sticking out from your face is enough like a fingertip to act as one in situations where your hands might be… Read More
Seven Days with the Xiaomi Mi Band: A Model of Simple Wearable Tech UX for Business
Worn Out With Wearables That well-worn maxim about keeping it simple, stupid (KISS) now applies as much to wearable tech (see what I did there?) user experience as it does to mobile or web apps. The challenge is to keep on keeping “it” simple as product managers and nervous C-types push for more bells and… Read More
2016 AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon: SafeDrop
It has become tradition now for us, AppsLab, the OAUX emerging technologies team, that the first thing in a New Year is to fly to Las Vegas, not solely testing our luck on the casino floor (though some guys did get lucky), but also attending to the real business–participating in the AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon to build… Read More
Here is a blast from the past: a letter I wrote to some friends back in 1994 about my very first VR experience. VR enjoyed a brief spin as the next big thing that year. Jaron Lanier had been featured in the second issue of Wired magazine and virtual reality arcades began to appear in… Read More
Look, I’m as fond of holodecks and the matrix as the next nerd. I was having queazy VR experiences back in 1994. That’s me just last month strapped into to a cheap plastic viewer, staring boldly into the future. I’ve been thinking and writing about virtual reality for over twenty years now. But are we… Read More
The Time I Ran Out of Gas
Before Christmas, I ran out of gas for the first time. All things considered, I was very lucky. It was just me in the car, and the engine died in a covered parking structure, in a remote corner with few cars. Plus, it was the middle of the day, during the week before Christmas, so not… Read More
Selfies. Social. And Style: Smartwatch UX Trends
From Antiques to Apple “I don’t own a watch myself,” a great parting shot by Kevin of Timepiece Antique Clocks in the Liberties, Dublin. I had popped in one rainy day in November to discover more about clock making and to get an old school perspective on smartwatches. Kevin’s comment made sense. “Why would he… Read More
AppsLab Research in 2015
As we exit 2015 and enter 2016, I’m reflecting on all that happened in AppsLab and looking forward to the future. Our 2015 research spanned the spectrum – from attitudinal to behavioral, domestic to international, controlled to ad hoc, low to high tech, and many more research tactics. I won’t bore you with stats and… Read More
Are you attending UKOUG Apps15 (#ukoug_apps15) or Tech15 (#ukoug_tech15)? If so, you are in luck! Once again we will run our ever popular scavenger hunt with a twist. From December 7-9 we will be at the ICC in Birmingham, UK working with the UKOUG team to give you a fun way to explore the conference and win prizes along… Read More
OpenWorld 2015 Highlights
It’s been nearly three weeks, and I’m finally getting around to sharing the highlights of our OpenWorld 2015. Enjoy. Keynotes Last year, Steve Miranda showed some of our project work in his keynote. This year, our Glance framework on the Apple Watch, made an appearance in Larry Ellison’s first keynote in a video showcasing the evolution… Read More
A Smart Badge for a Smart Office
Editor’s note: Maybe you got a chance to check out our IoT Smart Office demo at the OAUX Exchange during OpenWorld. If not, don’t fret, we’ll describe its many cool bits here, beginning with this post from Raymond (@yuhuaxie) on his smart badge build. A Smart Office needs an equally smart badge. We showcased the Smart… Read More
After a very successful Scavenger Hunt at Kscope15, we are back with an Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne edition. This time we partnered with the Oracle Technology Network (@oracleotn) folks to give Oracle OpenWorld (@oracleopenworld) and JavaOne (@javaoneconf) attendees a fun experience, and with even more chances of winning. The OTN Community Quest was designed to be a win-win experience. We… Read More
Connect All the Things: An IoT Nerf Gun – Part 2: The Software
Introduction In the first part of this series, I showed you how to mod a Nerf gun so it can connect to the internet, and you can electronically trigger it. In this second part, I will show you some software I created to actually remotely control the Nerf gun over the internet using various input devices.… Read More
Connect All the Things: An IoT Nerf Gun
Introduction As part of my foray into the Internet of Things (IoT) I was looking for a project I could sink my teeth in because I find it easier to learn something by doing it rather than just reading about it. It just happened to be that at JavaOne this year they will have a… Read More
The Glance Framework on Android Auto
A while back, I told you about Glance, a framework for wearables and other devices. Quick history review, Glance was born out of our frustration with rebuilding basic Oracle Cloud Applications notification functionality each time a hot new wearable device dropped, e.g. Google Glass, Pebble, Android Wear, etc. So, by the time the Apple Watch launched,… Read More