E276 - Time-Traveling with Augmented Reality

oh yes welcome back to another episode of human factors cast this is episode 276 we're recording this episode live on March 9th at 16th 2023. I'm your host Nick Rome I'm joined today by Mr Barry Kirby great to see you here Nick how are you doing well the time changes clearly got me all mixed up I don't even know what date it is uh I'm good I'm good we have a great show for you tonight we're going to be talking about a VR startup working on technology to replay memories later we'll answer some questions from the community on topics like what would you do if you were me a research roadmap tool and template and how to deal with stakeholders who don't understand qualitative research but first got some programming notes and Community updates here I just want to re-mention while we're on the show here uh patreon access to the pre and post show is now live I guess so it's a dial-in feature dial in give us your thoughts uh you can also access our show notes for paste it we're posting all this in our patreon channel on our Discord so if you are a patreon just a buck gets you in the door and uh you can you can call in and say whatever profanity you want we'll just turn you right off so there's that there's also also I want to mention this I should have led with this honestly there's an exciting announcement coming from us uh and a partner of ours it's a little tease if you're at Healthcare Symposium later this month you might see it there but we'll be sure to let you all know about the latest uh a little later this month I just want to throw out a little tease there but Barry what's the latest over at 1202 well at 1202 we have lived the interview with Martin Bromley who talks about he how his experiences and how he formed the clinical human factors group but coming on Monday is my interview with Jenny Radcliffe the people hacker she's the host of human factor security podcast she's a tedx and Nick keynote speaker as well as self-professed ethical burglar so she gets to talk to me um or she talked to me around how she's going to ethical hacking ethical burgling um as well as her new book that he's just out and well worth a read because I've got actually a paperback copy of it so hardback but actual physical book I've got and I don't get them very often and it's just a delight to read it oh the other human factors podcast that comes up when you search for human factors podcast I love it I can't wait to hear it all right well why don't we go ahead and get into the news that's why you're all here all right a team in factors news Barry what's the story this week so this week we're talking about Avia starter working on Tech 2 replay memories so virtual startup called Wist Labs has developed software that allows users to replay their memories over a specific real-life locations via augmented reality the process requires regular videos taken on a smartphone to be turned into a 3D representation using an app which can then be played back via a web browser smartphone or virtual reality headset the app is captured using the lidar sensors on particular Apple devices although this concept sounds exciting to many people it's also raised a bunch of concerns many are uncomfortable with the dystopian black mirror-like of idea of playing back recorded memories however unlike the science fiction examples it's been compared to users of the VR software developed by westlabs currently retain control over the memories they record so Nick what are your thoughts on being able to relive the most embarrassing moments you you wish history would just forget in full-time Technicolor oh yeah I could I could relive uh plenty of plenty of those uh look I think this is cool in theory uh and if you look at the video there's a video that goes along with this article with Labs has posted a video that kind of explains the concept um there's definitely some good memories I'd like to relive as well the this might actually technology like this might actually encourage me to engage and document more of my history if I could relive it later and if you think about what it could do though just high level this could be really dangerous to live in the past if you are not present and I can imagine this can be really painful or unhealthy for those healing from loss it's like a call back to an earlier episode that we did about talking to dead people and the whole grieving process of bringing them to life via AI that was episode 263 that kind of reminds me of what this is both of them Black Mirror Technologies um and and generally I think that there's a lot more that we can dig into and one of the reasons why I selected this story as a top story we could talk about that goes beyond this specific application of projecting a memory onto a AR mapped location Barry I am curious before we go into a deep dive what your thoughts on this are so I guess on the on the Facebook on the article as it's given as you just as you just read out then why not but I'd also then question why it's the sort of thing that it's a neat idea but I don't know whether it actually truly lives out to something that I would really really want to see um as the article says it is very much a um a black mirror type type thing or for those those of you who read truly highly classy um books um if you've read True Blood then there is a particular murder and some spells that it casts to relive that murder and work out how the murder actually happened um and so again it's it's it's a similar type of uh principle um just with less vampires and um and less werewolves um but then it starts then taking a load of questions for me if we start extending um what happens because at the moment yes it says that the um the whoever whoever creates them retains the um retains the the power over them um but how long will that last how long before um people start either hacking them or you know whatever happens to basically you lose the Privacy around it but actually there could be some really cool stuff as well if we then start sharing some of these things could you augment many different people's memories together to create a full perspective picture of what goes on could you share memories in order to enhance your own memory um and things like that and then you get back into well okay you start doing that well then how does that get abused um people could abuse it but also the state could start abusing it could they start abusing your memory um for whatever reason I mean possibly thin end of a wedge starts with the um with with meaningful things like the police want to recreate a terrible accident or a murder or something like that and everybody will give over their memories for the right reasons but then is that just at the end of a wedge um so with that in mind where should we take the conversation to uh to look at this in a bit more detail yeah I mean look here's like I wanna I wanna caveat this discussion that as we talk to Memories what we're really saying is videos on our phone yeah right because I mean let's just break down one more time how this Tech works and how it's expected to work before we start going off into Fantasyland so what this is actually doing is you've taken some video using your phone a camera some device that captures input and uh what happens then is it uses uh environmental contextual cues and even the lidar sensors that are present on like the pro models of iPhones to capture that depth perception I'm imagining there's some AI in play here that will map it appropriately that will calculate that depth appropriately and interpolate um you know positioning of objects in that memory in that video and that is what we're calling a memory um basically what this technology allows us to do is overlay those videos those memories uh onto physical locations that were present so there's a video that accompanies this article uh it's a it's a tweet by Wist and what it shows is basically a woman holding a baby on a couch and the perspective is somebody standing up away from the couch with a with the projected memory of the woman with the baby on the couch and the couch is empty otherwise so that is what we're looking at here just from a conceptual standpoint uh I think the real danger with this technology becomes when it comes when you start doing the yes and yes yes AR and VR okay well now you need to not only recreate that slice of of the environment that this was taken on but you need to start recreating the entire environment around it and what happens there well you're starting to interpret interpolate interpret you're starting to put in other details that were not there uh and and this has a really unique interesting effect on how we might start to rewrite our own memories where if there are details present in these memories that we're revisiting that were not there that were not present when we initially experienced those memories then we are going to start rewiring our brains to think about these memories in a way that has those additional details that weren't there before Camille uh Camille Paris was on on the pre-show with us should actually stopped by talked a little bit about her perspective and one thing that she brought up was this eyewitness memory uh or she she was talking about memory just in general and how it's fallible and how we sort of rewrite it and we were talking and eyewitness memory came up and um you know this is one thing that is so unreliable in a court system because you are relying on the details of somebody who has relived that moment and Camille brought up these uh these Flashpoint memories where they are very strong stimuli that are brought on by some uh traumatic or you know some some centralizing event right so the examples that she brought up was like JFK uh 911 would be another one Challenger would be another one um these types of memories that you know a lot of people have a collective idea of yes I am positive I remember exactly everything about that day but then they aren't necessarily accurate because there's either video or something else that proves that otherwise so it's just a very interesting connection with memory and where it could go if we start doing the yes and VR yes and whatever I mean the the point you highlight there is is really interesting isn't it because our memories uh as we know and as you just highlighted are not actually probably a true representation of what really happened they're our own um created version of what happened whether whether we like it or not and so if you're actually confronted with if you've got a memory of a situation like say you're a mother holding your child or uh you're a father see the mother hold the child um on the sofa and you maybe have a your your memory of how that happened to then watch that memory again in full technical 3D Technicolor um and it isn't how you remember it being well does that just devalue the memory that you've had um you know what is that going to jar you in some way um where's that where's truly where's the value in that um to yourself ah memory is just actually something the better that lives in that lives in your head um which is better than in some some cases I mean a lot of the things I think we talked about you could equally get as much but you would get as much value out of and have all the associated issues we've just been talking about we're just straight up video um but I think one of the things the video does the the video that does show the example of this is the person could reach out with their virtual hand and perhaps stroke the face of the mother as it were um which is I think one of the things that they did um so it's about whether you could get more out of that sort of interaction um than you would uh would nominate well let's let's talk about that that specific interaction there because to me what if okay so that's a happy memory right is this mother with a child it's like okay very cute what if that then becomes a sad memory because this person viewing that memory has lost one of them or something terrible um is that going to be good news for that person long term from an emotional health mental health well-being type of perspective I don't know if it is in the sense that if they keep revisiting that memory and try to live their lives in the past it can become a very dangerous slippery slope that you're on where literally everything projected in your you know they they say get rid of everything that reminds you of them you know maybe keep one or two sentimental things but get rid of everything else and I think that's sound advice for good reason because we found that the healing process requires us to go through that to not not forget about them but to remember them fondly and to focus on the good times and all that stuff and so if you're living on on those good times because you can actually relive those moments via an AR program or VR program then I don't think that has good long lasting implications for mental health and and there could be even worse examples of that if if you've been involved in an accident or you know something else like you've been attacked or something like that and there is video evidence of that um again you could easily sink into that reliving that moment time and time and time again um another example is if if something happened and you could have done something to avoid it oh you know and you relive that to try and work out if you could have done something differently um so you're right there is significant I do enough of that in my head exactly right yeah uh and that's that's the thing isn't it and if you're watching it and then watching not the bit that you so maybe a car accident um and you've got like the equivalent of the dash cam and you're watching yourself your own actions and think oh actually if I just press the break a moment sooner or you know swerved left instead of right or or something like that or seen this thing you know you could just end up reliving a nightmare over and over and over again because you wouldn't put it down um you know that that could be very very difficult but saying that you could do that just with a video as well so okay I was thinking I was thinking of a more um light-hearted example of saying something stupid on a podcast and then going no don't say that thing don't say that thing and then they say the thing so I'm guaranteed to say the same say the thing so um yeah okay so I I wanna I wanna ask you about this because you wrote it in all caps here um do you want to talk about this point because you're talking about painful memories and I think this kind of goes along that lines I just want to call out that that Barry has written this in all caps in the show notes well I think it is because it's something that's that's fairly topical in terms of the news here certainly here in the UK because there's been a few cases around it but we've all heard about revenge porn where you know you might have had a video that you've taken in intimacy with a partner and then suddenly you find it it's been they've distributed it all over the internet to your friends or you know that type of thing this could be the next step in that um going you know either just with what you've got already um but also then talk to you know going going with the example you gave earlier if it was then translated to virtual reality and things like that and it was you you then get a whole new level of busy abuse um of the of the uh the videos that you've done so it would take revenge Pawn to a to a whole new level that would just be really quite distressing yeah I mean not just not just revenge porn but any intimate memories right I mean if you think about them being used as blackmail or some sort of manipulation um you know with with basically any type of coercion happening that would threaten to release those publicly uh those sensitive and you know those sensitive memories publicly and say you know like wait hey we had a really heartfelt talk to talk heart-to-heart talk and there were some things said in that that maybe paint somebody in an unfavorable light or something and uh you know somebody else owns that memory quote unquote memory it's just a video on your phone that exists today but if somebody could relive that in VR then there's all these other the the interesting thing here is that there's not just sight I guess in VR there's proprioception as well so you get to see the relation of something to something else and again we talked a little bit about the interpolation of details what actually happens from the system perspective to fill in these gaps of knowledge uh based on what was happening in the environment right there's innocuous ones like okay I turn my head and the camera doesn't have the data from this side of my head but it's captured that side of my head with other you know it it's captured my head and it knows what it looks like so it can go ahead and paint that there but what about the spider on the wall that it can't see what about the uh you know what about the cats walking around in the background that it can't see and so I think when you start to interpolate all those details when you start to fill in things that may or may not exist you might actually start to see the decline um when it comes to the way in which we tell our stories because if we're reliving these things with details interpolated we're going to go off of those details as we re-watch them it will recode our memories to Omit details and so it's not a true memory although we do do this already this is a process that we already engage in as we relive a memory we are already rewriting that but the danger comes from I guess technology altering that process a little bit because it is then introducing things that may or may not have been there and your mind can't accurately parse that information because it takes it as fact when maybe it wasn't yeah and then I guess looking at a more simplistic level as well what I'm doing moves the sofa yeah with the example if the the mother sat on the sat on the sofa with the child you moved the sofa um and that just then looks completely different or the curtains are open you've closed the curtains or something like that so that can also um probably have it or it might be jarring but we probably focused on the negative quite a lot here about how there's got to be some positive use for this rather you know as well as just seeing some cool memories um but you sort of highlighted it here about some therapeutic applications I mean we've talked about the the bad reliving of memories but what about the good really reliving of memories it could be as simple as for like maybe for meditation and things like that some reliving some good experiences in your life the yeah that time when you won the award for bed best podcast ever in the world um and you know I was a fabricated memory I was not oh right it's probably one that's coming um but you know what I mean the them sort of memories and allow you to watch back you can watch back your graduation you can watch back um and all them sort of things so there's got to be some of these really um positive aspects of being able to do something in um in near real life I guess I hate to I hate to be the downer because you're bringing up some good points yeah it'd be great to relive these and I think everything is that's true in moderation because there's also the potential for addiction some people might become addicted to reliving these past experiences and again I'm I'm talking about living in the present versus living in the past if they're reliving these past experience and just reliving their Glory Days of being a high school football player you know then where where are you now where are you what are you doing now that's that's kind of the danger but you're absolutely right let's talk about the positive there are some really positive things that can come out of this you said reliving your memories if you're not too indulgent or reliant on them to where you can still function in your everyday life that is great let's talk about another application therapy can you imagine walking through a painful memory alongside your therapist pointing out things that were happening that maybe you can't see because you have a very certain perspective about what happened um that might I think be a very healthy thing if you were to walk through it with a mental health professional uh who can walk you through these things and point out some of the parts you know you could have pressed that break but if you look you didn't have the the same level of awareness that you have now you you you wouldn't have made that choice if you played this 50 times so like you know maybe being able to go through something like that you know this what you've just described there is the Vulcan mine meld you're basically saying this is a Spock type device oh man Chris Reed would be happy I think uh that we're making a Star Trek reference on the show uh I'm a Star Wars guy so I'm imagining a mind meld is kind of just like a you know making sure everything is is uh communicating can go across with your mind and therefore you share your experiences and you can walk through them together what we'll just described um which is why Star Trek is clearly better than Star Wars um anyway moving on moving on let's not have that debate that'll be two hour long podcast at least yes so there's some other points that we could make with this right and I think um I kind of alluded to it with the addiction piece what does this mean for society if we have a society that is then looking at these memories just if you think about making or not making this technology but let's say this technology becomes pervasive in a way where there's this over Reliance on the need for or or the way in which we think about memory retention and so thinking about these problems these memories from a oh I gotta share with you this memory but really it's just a video okay you share a video but but it's the way I remember it because it's encoded in my head that way um and therefore there might be this increased Reliance when it comes to this type of thing uh from a societal perspective you can also look at this from I guess the societal perspective as well the social isolation piece again if you have somebody who's um addicted to reliving these past experiences that might uh infringe on their personal I guess uh lives the social interaction piece making us all less social well I'm gonna throw something out there in terms of the society and culture and say actually the the impact of doing this with people on their mobile phones and and doing stuff that way is no better no worse than video right because all this sort of stuff you can do with video what happens if you use it on CCTV okay so you are no longer taking the perspective of that person the person recording it but now you're looking at 3D augmentation from CCTV cameras and you can recreate anything in any uh community space okay well that that that is cool uh I I had a time where CCTV uh determined that I was not at fault for an accident that I got into and I would love to relive that moment just to see what it looked like from that camera I never got to see it but it saved me from from getting you know from from being liable that would be cool because then you could start to uh and I I know technology like this is existing currently where in forensics you have multi-sources sort of painting a three-dimensional thing they've done this a lot with like January 6th where you have a lot of different sources of information and they are painting a 3D picture of what is happening at all times and so imagining being able to plot yourself anywhere there's data and understanding what's going on at that point in time would be kind of cool and kind of interesting especially from a historian's perspective because you are opening up a lot more information to folks to historians specifically right imagine like no one's noticed this before there was somebody sitting down through all this and nobody noticed them sitting there in that corner because one of the yeah one of the biggest problems with CCTV coverage both live and aftermath is you're looking at a banker screens and trying to and particularly you've we've seen store security for example or um shopping mall security you know they're looking at Banks of tens to hundreds of screens and so having to piece together some stuff like that now if you could do that augment them all together with their cool lidar stuff um in a lot so you're sat there with a pair of glasses on and you can interact with that thing live now that would be very cool but even after the fact Something's Happened and you can recreate that stuff easily so not just having to PC together as you just described but actually you just flip on the headset and you then interact with all of that together um that would be a a real um really cool use of that sort of technology that I could see have some real positive benefits as long as we're talking about real cool uses of this technology can you imagine taking that but then being able to replay that in um a scenario where you're looking at uh like like a piece of media right let's say somebody has an um a like a local news reporting of an incident that happened and there was footage right the the the local news media cameraman could literally pan over and then have that memory that video overlaid on what happened mapped appropriately kind of like they do in football games American football games where they map on the uh the UI elements of the football field yeah uh it could it could happen very similarly similarly for other broadcasts and like documentaries being able to go to a location and Stitch these things together as something were to happen that would be really impressive technology and a good way a good way to use that technology for storytelling purposes so I think um you know especially if you think about like uh like documentaries about your your favorite individuals or whatever right they Dale the Barry Kirby story and and in it you know Barry shows all his memories on his phone where he's talking with his uh dearly beloved at dinner about human factors and is secretly recording it for patreon bonus content which hasn't happened by the way but I'm pushing for it and so so yeah you have these memories and then they can overlay them with at the locations that they actually happened and that might be kind of cool so rather than just talking about the how cooler and cool this is should we talk about some of the human factors aspects about this so one of the biggest issues I think there's going to be is um if they don't get it quite right so it isn't either captured in high enough Fidelity or we can't swim you're gonna get that whole um you know you've got to be able to get immersed in it for it to get the get the value and so if it's just off if it's really off actually we can we can deal with that a lot better for some reason but actually in um if it's just off then you're gonna hit that uncanny valley piece aren't you where you're you know it's just off therefore you just rubbish it because it's just not quite right right um you're not going to be able to get immersed in it so the engineering behind this um is going to be really quite important because if you don't get the engineering spot on then you we just won't be able to uh we won't be able to use it in fact the ability for them to induce like Sim sickness and um that that sort of thing because your brain's just going to start rejecting what it's saying uh it's probably quite High so yeah I thought just just throw that out there well let's talk about another human factors application here training training is another big one where you can imagine that in a training course you can replay a memory and augmented reality and get a different perspective on how you approach the situation so that way you get personalized feedback in sort of a 3D environment right so imagine imagine a surgeon in training makes a makes a mistake on um a cadaver and they're able to go back and look at that from sort of a recording perspective of what went wrong so they can then self-diagnose what happened in that moment and understand better what their error was so that might be a good way to train you could also replay memories of other successful times that something went right um you know where where take the take the aviation domain where somebody is landing a plane um or you know some Landing a plane without a tail and they have a lot of things going on that they need to manage and there's you know cockpit recording of it that you can get that bird's eye view of what's going on in the cockpit and you can actually look at their thought process almost see it live as their manipulating all the controls so that's another way I think that training could be impacted by this right that's true and it'd be interesting to yeah not only trading but I thought Mission rehearsal piece isn't it it's that whole seeing all the the almost the mentoring piece where you've got either your memory or somebody else's memory there that's recorded it's overlaid on you so you can see what you're supposed to be doing um given a certain circumstance so that could have a huge cost benefit um both in a training perspective but also in a um in a you know potential disaster um scenario or potential malfunction or whatever so yeah because there could be a huge amount of benefit there yeah I agree uh you know I think for me there there's other human factors applications those are the big ones another one that I want to bring up kind of is the cyber security aspect of this you can imagine that there could potentially be we talked about a little bit with the revenge porn and with like the other um extortion of somebody else because of these sensitive memories but what if those were accessed without your permission um you know the the one of the points of this article is that you have control over what Memories um they can record and access but what if a malicious actor came into that system and started accessing those without your permission so you could get you know all those memories and replay them and not only that but there's other cyber security implications that's just the opening of the well because then you can get let's say the memory has you know your password your Wi-Fi password written on your wall and then somebody now has access to your Wi-Fi it's mapped to a physical location that physical location data is probably stored with the video with the memory so now you have a place and time of recording and a physical location data of where that was taken and so now if you were trying to break into somebody's home you know what the locks look like on the other side you know X Y and Z about their living space depending on how long something was taken you know so I mean there's that aspect of it too cyber security is another really big um concerned with this because I imagine there's not just cyber criminals breaking into systems but then there's also the the human piece of of sharing information without knowing what pieces of information are in there yeah yeah that's a really interesting pieces I don't know behold um cyberpiece was because you smacked off two thoughts firstly is around dementia and for dementia patients being able to have that ability to replay stuff that they've forgotten and therefore respect remembrancy domain so that that's a really cool use but then you're thinking about cyber really said right so if if I've got amnesia and got my phone and I wanted to um try and reboot somebody we could use that to do that which would be a cool thing however if I was some sort of malicious actor and therefore wanted to implant false memories you know I've seen the movies this clearly happened um but you know I mean that that is a um almost a legitimate way of that happening you don't remember the event this is telling you that this is what happened oh it it must have been then um and going back to the whole you know car accident that type of thing if while you are submitting your this video or whatever as part of your evidence of what happened is somebody is able to go into that and manipulate that before it gets to um you know under undersealed evidence then again which I guess again my argument comes back to that could just happen with a video as well but if this is because the way it's generated actually opens it up to it's more vulnerable to manipulation because there is an element of generation around it um then that's also something else we would have to have to consider not insolvable but I have to consider yeah do you have any other uh last thoughts on this article Barry before we move on I I think I kind of just go back to my initial reaction of yeah why not but really why I don't I think it's cool and that people have listened to me go on about tech this some tech I think is really cool and it's probably completely pointless but I think it's really cool this I'm just kind of thinking yeah all right but I don't over considering what you can do with the video I don't truly see what it gives me so I guess it would have to it's a probably one of these things it's going to be a stepping stone it's a good starting point for something but why what about you Nick what's your final thoughts a couple key takeaways here I just wonder what this could potentially do for Education if you have immersive learning experiences reliving some of these critical historical events using these things could be a really uh interesting way to communicate what happened to those learning about that event then also just the larger social aspect of this as a social psychologist classically trained right I am really interested in how society would react to basically having this technology and what this means for memory and recall when it comes to uh some of these events and what that means for interactions with others what that means for interactions with technology what that means for human behavior in general and the way that we regulate our emotions it's all very interesting to me just opening up cans of worms like I normally do but I just want to thank our patreons this week and everybody else who selected our topic and thank you to our friends over at futurism for our new story this week if you want to follow along we do Post links to all the original articles in our weekly roundups in our blog you can also join us on Discord for more discussion of these stories and much more and take a quick break and then we'll be back to read a dumb commercial right after this human factors cast brings you the best in human factors News interviews conference coverage and overall fun conversations into each and every episode we produce but we can't do it without you the human factors cast network is 100 listener supported all the funds that go into running the show come from our 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conference Recaps who knows you might even learn something new so there you have it folks our website is the Holy Grail of all things handsome Mr Barry Kirby and fantastic Nick Rome podcast content uh don't be shy go check us out at humanfactorscast.media thank you and good night here we go with the next part of the show it came from definitely having you read that next week all right let's get switch gears and get into it came from this is part of the show where we search all over the Internet to bring you topics the community is talking about you find any of these answers useful helpful give us a like wherever you're watching or listening to help other people find this com content uh yeah Barry's just pointing out that it says Exit with a dance move I'm going to not do that all right uh this first one up here tonight is from user Sania from the ux research subreddit what would you do if you were me as a ux research Apprentice with eight months of experience and planning to earn a bachelor's degree I want to ensure that I am making myself an attractive applicant for future career opportunities what skills should I focus on outside of my degree to be more competent in research what does career growth look like for a ux researcher how can I get myself set up for a fulfilling career doing meaningful work with the knowledge I have now Barry so for me firstly is focusing on doing you know you do you're doing your apprenticeship focus on doing that well and doing your degree well but if you're looking for a slight curveball into what it what else is useful things basically talking to people is really really useful there's skills to be able to engage with people um or who might be something difficult or might have their own agendas the ability to get under um basically not under their skin but under the wrapper of what they are to to get that elusive information is really good so you could consider things like doing a um public speaking type courses or things like that or maybe even drama and and that type of thing things that allow you to to give you confidence to go and talk to individuals and groups of people particularly in maybe environments that you might not feel too comfortable yourself so as a bit of a curveball and that's not on the on anybody's um on on anybody's hit list of things to do but I think that's if you've got that core skill about being able to talk to people then you'll make a great ux researcher Nick what do you think no I agree with that and I think there's you know something to be said about getting experience in tangentally related skill sets or domains I'm going to extend that to domains if you find an internship or some opportunity to work in a domain that interests you that may or may not be in your career path go and go and explore that because then you can know before you even get into that domain whether or not it's something that you want to continue exploring that and that goes even broader than that get practical experience doing things collaborate with local community uh members and companies and businesses um on projects that you might be able to offer your services pro bono actually getting that work in or seek out academic research Labs or just research labs in general hey wink wink nudge nudge uh human factors cast has one but look at that I mean you you get that experience in a lab setting uh learning about process and procedure for how to do something and that can help you out too so there's there's a lot of different ways but I think the the bottom line get involved get experience outside of the classroom that that'd be my two cents there all right this next one up here is research roadmap tool or template by userjammers9787 on the ux research subreddit do you have any tool suggestions for creating a research roadmap how can I map out the recommendations for future stakeholder workshops surveys live interviews and concept testing that need to be done in a specific order my goal is to inform resource allocation Barry how do you map out research have you where's that it depends button um because we're going to need it I it for me it really does depend it's the it depends on the and just to map it out to map it out hey see if I did there um on the granularity of what you're doing and whether you want it to be more of a rich picture or you want it to be very formulaic whether it's it's more of a project plan or it's something that you're trying to show um you know you're trying to present to your end customer to sort of show um or maybe even like a senior manager on something that is going to be really quite cool um also how often do you need to update it if it's something that's just a one-off then maybe it's part it's going to be part of a project proposal and it wants to look quite cool then then that then that's they're all factors that play into the different tools there's loads of different tools out there and without stealing what I think Nick's probably going to say um find out the tools that you're comfortable with using and if you're going to be go with different teams of different times then you know just get a broad variety under your belt I wouldn't stick with one because um you're going to end up shooting yourself in the foot a little bit each different tool has it has different pros and cons to it anybody uh thank you for not stealing that uh but basically my my advice here use the tool that everyone else on your team is using especially if you are planning to communicate this externally to other teams if you're just doing this to monitor it yourself just make a Google Sheets or Excel document it doesn't matter for you you can keep track of that but if your team is using a piece of software like jira like Asana like uh teams or you know any other piece of of technology that allows you to track uh what are some of the other ones Monday it doesn't matter the tool like Barry said you're going to need to learn new tools all the time so being able to adapt and be flexible and I recommend using the same tool that whatever your product team is using so that way you can point that research to the things that the product is developing and that goes for software development that goes outside of software development too use whatever everyone else is that's that's my advice all right let's get to this last one here anyone dealing with stakeholders that don't understand qualitative research this is by desperate desk 9949 on u-x Research subreddit I feel like some of these names are made up uh how can I educate a stakeholder about a value of exploratory qualitative research when they have a scientific background and prefer research that produces numbers I've tried to involve them in the planning process and create formal plans for the research but they still don't seem to understand the importance of this type of research any advice on how to educate them quickly and effectively Barry how do you do this well short of a baseball bat um it's it's translate and teach really so you've got to show them the value and the only way that you really get across problems like this is by giving them that mic drop moment of when you can show them a bit of insight um that they couldn't have got through just looking at numbers um there's different ways of of doing that um and sometimes you just might not get there there might be so stuck into what they're doing that they're just not interested they're just not interested then I guess you won't need to take a step back and think about what or get them to articulate why they why they think they that their numbers are more important than than what you're giving them um looking at the um at the balance of both sides and getting that sort of feedback so it's a lot of it depends it's a lot of talk to them it's it's a lot of um translating what they think they want out of stuff if you've got something that can give the mag drop moment then that's brilliant that that will get them over the edge because you're showing value and that's really what if you can prove value in what you're doing then you win um and actually you could almost argue if you can't show value then now you're doing the right thing anyway um no I think I think that's right and I think I think the important piece about what you were saying is showing it in a successful context if you can show how this has led to other things like Persona development or um you know Journey mapping and and really pulling out that qualitative data and showing them what you do with that data I think that is probably the most important piece the other way that you can start to look at this information is to quantify the qualitative in an effort to communicate with this person the these stakeholders so what I mean by that is Mark off how many times this comment was brought up across all your people you know do a sentiment analysis you know they were x amount of comments that were positive and x amount of comments that were negative they like to see those numbers you know engineers and and product managers tend to think in numbers sometimes so if you can if you can put a qualitative value to a number sometimes that is more effective at communicating exactly what it is that you're trying to communicate then the rock quote itself um so I don't know that's that's the approach that I like to take is quantifying those numbers or quantifying those those quotes uh and I I think it works out pretty well okay well that was fun now it's time for one more thing Barry what's your one more thing this week so my one more thing was a is a series that I just binge watched um and it's called Outlast and it's about 70 16 17 people in class at Lone walls that are dropped in Alaska and in the Alaskan Wilderness and they've got a last for as long as they can last longer than anybody else so it's a survival program but the there's a couple of key tweaks to it one is that you cannot win on your own you have to be part of a team um and so they start off so they are going in the git get split into four teams um and so you can go from one team to another and all this sort of stuff but it's when you get into it and it's only it's Eight Episodes long and it's on Netflix so it was just so interesting it's brutal it is but not for any reason to survival of such humanity is brutal the way that we can bully and you sort of want to get there and not see the um the bullies win out and I won't spoil it as to what happens but you are sitting there just going oh my God and I had to binge I sort of put what you know when you flicking through Netflix and going I'm just going to watch um whatever's on there just because it's in the background and absolutely hooked absolutely hooked all in two days now nailed a lot of it um which is then led us on to um which was started just before coming to um the show tonight was another one where the it's it's it is another Survivor one but it's for a bunch of um it's uh snowflake camp where they've got um I think it's like eight or ten um kids who uh whose parents are just sick and they're so um they won't do any work they're all about their looks and their spoiled kids basically and so we've literally just started watching it's almost like the obviously the antithesis of this this other one yeah you haven't got survivalists you've got kids who just don't know how to survive and they're gonna learn and become better people because I hope that's what we get to but Outlast I'd recommend going to watching from a psychology perspective absolutely fascinating you know what I want to throw stuff to tell you as well I did have another one more thing but I'm gonna switch it after hearing your analysis of Outlast because I also have a Netflix program that I'd like to talk about which is perfect match have you heard of this one it's a survival game but for love and so so okay look so Netflix has all these terrible reality shows right with that like Love is Blind uh and the circle and uh what's the other one the mole was another one so this this is basically like their uh their Avengers end game where everybody gets together in this one house trying to find love trying to find their perfect match right and so the way that it's done is so interesting and I would change a lot about the design of how they do it but basically they put you know five members of One gender and then five members of another gender in this uh in this home and they have to pair up for the night and whoever doesn't get paired up for the night leaves and then there's all this like mingling that just feels like weird and gross as like people are just trying to latch on to something as and so like it's completely artificial and totally bogus but it's fun to watch uh people are terrible and that just your Outlast reminded me that people are terrible in fact there's a few select individuals on that program that are just really I just hate watching them and one wanted them to leave the entire time um so not gonna spoil how that goes but anyway that's it for today everyone if you if you like this episode and enjoy some of the discussion about terrible Netflix shows uh no no not that one that's that's when I talked to Barry do you understand enjoy this episode enjoy some of the discussion about this technology this Black Mirror technology I'll encourage you all to go listen to uh episode 263 where we where Heidi and I sat down to talk about uh talking to dead people and how that's about to get real uh comment wherever you're listening with what you think of the story this week for more in-depth discussion you can join us on our Discord community visit our official website sign up for our newsletter stay up to date with all the latest human factors news if you like what you hear you want to support the show there's a couple ways that you can do that one wherever you're watching or listening right now you can give us a five star review that is free for you to do really helps us out two you could always tell your friends about the show word of mouth is the number one way in which we grow so that's our kind of preferred method if you want to support the show do that three if you have the financial means to and want to support us you can do that on patreon just a buck gets you in the door for a ton of stuff I'm telling you the value of a dollar goes so far with patreon and of course there's other tiers depending on what your availability is all right as always links to all of our socials and our website and are in the description of this episode I want to thank Mr Perry Kirby for being on our show today where can our listeners go and find you if they want to talk about watching terrible Netflix shows oh I'm always available on Twitter Facebook and on a social and legend of the score okay if you want to come and also talk talk to interesting individuals and personalities within the human factors domain come and go to go to 1202podcast.com for the 1202 human factors podcast where I interview loads and loads of different people about loads of different things and you can also Now find the 1202 socials on Instagram Tick Tock and all that sort of stuff where we were throwing out loads of different types of content and shorts from the interviews that we've been doing excellent as for me I've been your host Nick Rome you can find me on our Discord and across social media at Nick underscore Rome thanks again for tuning in to human factors cast under