🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA
This week: Does bionic reading really work, and take a glance at the future - AI generated sketch based renders
👋 Announcements — Intern Panel Recap, Opportunity Section in Interaction Nerds, What is HCI?
Intern Panel Recap
Last week UXA hosted an intern panel where we got to learn about landing an internship and how to make the most of your summer. Our intern panel came from a number of different backgrounds and interned at some awesome companies (Microsoft, HP, Phillips, IA Collaborative, Google)! Check out the notes and takeaways from this event that we compiled for you below! 📒
Interaction Nerds Opportunity Section
Interaction Nerds is starting an opportunity section to feature different opportunities in CMU HCII, such as project assistants, user studies participants, etc.! Looking for participants for your research or project? Wanting to recruit students to work in your lab or on your project? Advertise in the UXA newsletter! Fill out this form with some information about what you want to advertise, and we’ll feature your project/opportunity on the UXA newsletter! ✨
WTF is HCI
UXA is thinking of hosting a “WTF is HCI” event where we’ll go over what HCI really means, what you can do with it, and all the specifics of the different undergraduate HCI programs offered at CMU! In preparation for the event, we’d love to hear about your interests and goals with an event like this! We’d really appreciate if you could take a few minutes to fill out this interest form and let us know your thoughts! 🤔
🌱 Reading Corner — Bionic Reading, Does It Really Work
Bionic reading, in its essence, is a reading aid that guides the eye through bolding specific characters in a word, helping readers to complete words without reading the entire letter combinations.
Some people (including Sean) loved using it. However, concerns are raised along with praises—does Bionic Reading actually work?
Readwise conducted an experiment in June 2022, and stated an interesting result: Bionic Reading, in fact, makes you read slower 🤪
After analyzing data from 2,074 testers, we found no evidence that Bionic Reading has any positive effect on reading speed. In fact, participants read 2.6 words per minute slower on average with Bionic Reading than without. That said, the difference here is so small (less than 1%), that the real takeaway is Bionic Reading has no impact on reading speed.
How did they do the test? And what made them come to a conclusion with such positivity? Read the blog to find out!
🍄 Side Notes — Turn Sketches to 3D Renders Using AI in Figma
As the floodgates of DALLE 2 were opened and people on the waitlist gained access (including members of UXA), people started incorporating such into their everyday work.
This is a Figma plugin currently under development by Antonio Cao, which allows you to generate a complete render based on a simple sketch frame on Figma using Stable Diffusion. 😯
🤔 Who’s behind the scenes?
Thanks for reading this week’s Interaction Nerds by CMU UXA! The editors behind this work are Sean Shen and Rebecca Jiang.
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