E300 - Navigating the Future: From Accessible Gaming to AI's Creative Bounds

[00:00:00] Nick Roome: It's been a while since we've done this and we'll be here your once a month podcast.

I joke about it, but honestly, like at this rate between everything

[00:00:07] Barry Kirby: going

[00:00:08] Nick Roome: on,

[00:00:08] Barry Kirby: I've been doing more 1202s than we've been doing

[00:00:11] Nick Roome: this enough times. We know. That's what is it? What is it? So that's, we're down to what? 12 a year, 12 annual shows if we do it once a month. Which,

[00:00:21] Barry Kirby: we could do that.

That's we

[00:00:23] Nick Roome: could like, I don't know. I might want to look into how to adjust the format. If we ended up doing that ultimately, cause I don't know. I like this. I like this. I like. Talking without, truthfully, without the show notes to keep us on track. Although I do miss that

[00:00:44] Barry Kirby: a little bit.

So I think there's got to be a happy medium. Maybe there it's a, I think once a month is probably not, but maybe once a fortnight is, as a baseline. And then if we get to do more in between them, then we'll do and. Neil's very quick off the mark. Neil Gainey's said hello to us on LinkedIn.

So good. In fact, what time is good? Is it good? More afternoon with you? Afternoon. Yeah. Afternoon. Good old

[00:01:09] Nick Roome: Neil. Neil is here every time we stream every single time. Thank you,

[00:01:15] Barry Kirby: Neil.

[00:01:15] Nick Roome: And in

[00:01:15] Barry Kirby: fact, Neil popping up there has reminded me, I don't think I replied to your last email and I must do so my apologies for that, but please do carry on carrying in filling out the form regardless.

Which is very encrypted messaging for anybody else out there. So there we go. Fill out the form. What you've been up to then? So since we last chatted have you moved the ergonomic dial in any way? Have I moved the ergonomic dial in any way? Have you done some fun and interesting things?

[00:01:44] Nick Roome: Huh? That's a no. Okay. Wow. You make my life sound so, so boring. You know how it is. You get caught up with something. And actually, how about this? How about this last time we were on one of these things, we got the question about happy medium. These dad jokes. I love, I live for these dad jokes. Happy speeding.

Last time we were on, somebody in chat asked us about human factors being applied to domains or industries that would really benefit from it. Yeah. Yep. And I had brought up like legal and tax code. So speaking of taxes was a big old thing that we do here in the States. It's a big old thing we do here in the States.

How do I want to tell this story? So it's been looming on my plate. And in fact, it's been on my to do list for a while now. My very long to do list of stuff that is blurred out intentionally. It's probably, yeah, probably for the best. Yep. There it is. It's it's actually number one on there.

I did them, but it's not crossed off yet. So I'll just show you. It's my number one. Taxes. They're done. But, the way that they were done was very interesting. This weekend, or I guess this last weekend, I was saying I'm going to do it Saturday. Saturday comes and goes. I take care of a bunch of other things on this list.

I've just frozen. Look at me.

[00:03:07] Barry Kirby: Oh, you have? Yeah. You're frozen.

[00:03:09] Nick Roome: Look at you. Yeah. Turn off your camera. Turn it back on. See if that works.

[00:03:13] Barry Kirby: It does. It happened to me when I was recording the other day.

[00:03:16] Nick Roome: Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again? Annoying. Now you're just a disembodied voice.

That's okay. I like it. Hopefully. There we go. Okay. Yeah. There you are. Hi. So to finish to start the story even because I haven't even begun. Saturday didn't happen Saturday. Took care of a bunch of other things on that list. Sunday, didn't happen Sunday cause I ended up going to bed at 8 or 9?

Nice. Yeah. It was a very early evening, and which has actually had some lasted impacts for the way I've been sleeping this week. I've not gone to bed after 10pm, which is very abnormal for me. I'm usually an after midnight. Type of person. Huh. So anyway, all that to say on, went to bed early on Sunday night.

And then I woke up at 2 AM and I got out all my tax forms and I literally sat here and did all my taxes at 2 AM, went back to bed at three. And then got a notice from the IRS in the morning saying, Hey, you got this wrong and in, in my sleepy stupor. I had mixed up my wife's birthday and my son's birthday.

In terms of the day and not the like everything else was fine, but the days were swapped, right? Hey, this is wrong. And so I swapped them and then they're like, okay, this is right. So I, I wonder how much else I got wrong in my sleepiness. And I hope it's not a lot.

[00:04:48] Barry Kirby: Surely the whole, the way that you guys submit taxes is got to be right for good.

Yeah. Cause The, how much of it, again, because we do our tax very differently. We do basically the government is very kind. They take it off us pretty much straight away. And so we do pay as you earn. So it's all your employer largely gets calculated all and it's all take taken off at source and all that sort of stuff.

So that makes life nice and easy. So there's very little, unless you're like me. So I do a tax return or rather my assistant does my tax return. Because I'm self employed, but the how much detail do you have to go into? What sort of, is it the, you have to keep like all your receipts for the entire year or is it

[00:05:30] Nick Roome: although.

Some people do, and the reason that you might want to do that is if you have your own business or get certain, how do I simplify this for someone who's never done U. S. taxes? Anyone who's based in the U. S. who wants to help me out here, help me out please. I'm gonna try to simplify it in this way.

When you get employed in the United States, there's a form that you fill out and you say, I want you to keep this much of my money. Okay. And you have control over that for reasons that are here in the United States, you can hold multiple jobs and you can hold multiple different ways of earning money through things like.

Patreon or, Hey, by the way, there it is. If you want to do that through a Patreon or through various other way, a second job or consulting or, any number of things you can have income sources and you might not want to tax those things, but you might want to just withhold a little bit extra on your main paycheck.

So that way, all the things that you're earning income from are taxed appropriately because you might not be taxed on those when they send those to you. And so the long and short of it is everyone who has sent you money over the course of the year will send you a little thing saying, Hey, we've been keeping track.

Here's all the money that we sent you. That you have to report on as income. And then there are brackets, obviously, if you make so much, then you follow within a certain bracket. And then you have to pay that much, which is why that form that I mentioned when you get hired at a place is so important, because if something else puts you over that bracket or into a different bracket, then you're going to have to withhold a different amount.

Yeah. And so over a certain amount, it stacks it's not off your entire thing, but it, the stuff that's over that amount will have to get taxed at a new rate. And what we end up having at the end of the year is all these pieces of paper from various sources of income and this, could be one, for one person, it could be for, if you're filing together and there's reasons to file together because we have a child and get a tax break because we have a kid and have to pay for certain things for him, and government's here you go, good on ya.

But we get all these forms, and we gotta put them into one place, and then file it, send it off to the IRS, and say, Here you go, you know exactly what I owe ya, is what I paid ya, from the withholding. What here's my math. Here's, you know what it should be. Is that right? And you hope, and then most of the time you get it right.

[00:08:20] Barry Kirby: So they already know how much you owe them. They already do. So why don't the, just send you a bill that says, here you go. Pay this, please. Yeah, that'd be nice. Wouldn't it be that just, there are, They must have already worked it out. Therefore they go, here you go. Pairs this. Unless you have reasons not to think that.

Anyway I, There are a number of reasons why we are slightly critical of the USA at the moment. So I think that's probably the the least issue right now. So

[00:08:53] Nick Roome: part of the problem, yes, the IRS knows exactly what you owe them. We can just call this human taxters cast and they do know, and what's happening is a result of companies lobbying.

One may or may not start with an I, which is a parent company of another software that starts with a T.

They lobby and you can file your taxes for free. The problem is that it's not easy to do. Now, that's changing. There's been some funding, government funding, to be put into a self service portal for people to fill out their taxes, which is great.

It's actually a nice change. Not a whole lot of people know about this yet, so they still use the T program that you have to pay for. And. There's some chat that we'll read in just a second. Yes, you can, you could become a politician just using that as a platform. Hey, instead of, we'll send you a check.

So let's read some comments here. Neil Nick, you're ahead of me. I'm presuming that's on taxes. There's a lot of way that politicians have established to get discounts on your taxes based on certain things, i. e. you contribute to the economy. So if you have your own business, if you. Basically employ others if you have children, X, Y, and Z.

So you can take, different types of things. If you're, if you have a business, you might want to do like an itemized deduction where that is counting the receipts and seeing all that stuff. It's dark magic. Yes, it is. And then but the accountants and tax software companies lobby hard to make it hard to understand.

Keep themselves in business. That is true. Let me and then Neil's asking for that link. Let me see here. So from what I understand, Neil, the the I'll find it. Us tax. I don't even know what to look for. I've seen it in some of my in some of my feeds. So I'll try to find it while we're talking here.

But the is this it? IRS direct file pilot? Yeah so there are some caveats to this. I'll paste it in chat so hopefully you can see it. It'll be pasted across across certain channels. It doesn't look like it's been pasted to LinkedIn. So it's directfile. irs. gov. And this is it's a pilot for the This.

Government funded option, and it's pretty limited this year. It's a pilot, so it's going to have, you can only do it if you have a W2, 1099G, SSA 1099, 1099. I N T boxes one and three. This is Barry. This is code for, I was going to say that really complex here. But if you have a 10 99 NEC or a 10 99 miscellaneous or a 10 99 K or 10 99 R unallocated tips or unreported tips, alimony that is required to be included in your income, that's what we're None of that.

So it can't handle the complex use cases, but I'm pretty sure this is like a slow rollout. So that way over time, this will become a more reliable free option. Because yeah, the tax companies and accountants lobby hard. So it's confusing so that you use their software and consultants to simplify it.

All right. We've spent what? 15 minutes talking about taxes because I sleep earlier.

[00:12:18] Barry Kirby: Do you feel better about all that now though?

[00:12:20] Nick Roome: No, there's there's, it's, I dunno, I always feel like I've done something wrong when I file my taxes. And part of the reason is because I got a check from a different state that I lived in a couple of years ago where I did file something wrong and they're like, Hey you owe us 2, 000.

And I'm like, how did I, yeah, that's a big difference. How did I mess up that bad? And so I try to be more, I try to save more up front. And say, okay hopefully you got what you need and you can just give me some stuff back and that yeah, it's big old nightmare. No, I don't feel great about it because I got more back this year than I did last year and it seems like I did something wrong.

[00:13:07] Barry Kirby: Oh, I'm sure. Yes, it's if it makes you feel any better, I've been on the wrong side of that before that was it last year when, because I'm doing two different roles at the moment, and then obviously in a similar way to what you described, we can offset the tax on, set the balance on where the money comes out of, and And for some reason, one, one of the people doing it didn't quite set it up right.

And so we had the taxman come to me and say, you owe us a bit of money. And it turns out it was quite a lot of money. So we're like, okay, fair enough. I don't like it, but there we go. Anyway I guess so we should probably move on to different things that you could apply human factors to.

Yeah. Yeah. Hang on.

[00:13:48] Nick Roome: While we're live there's more people filing in. So thank you for pun intended with the Taxes and filing more people coming in. So thank you for joining us. Wow. There's actually quite a bit of you right now. Wow. That's a lot. So if you're watching us there's a couple of things you can do.

One, you can leave us a voicemail too. I'm actually going to put a link here. If you want to join us for some conversation tonight that'd be amazing. We would love. To know what's new in, in the human factors world. You want to share some interesting work that you've been working on with us you can be a disembodied voice.

You don't have to be on camera. All that stuff. So what I'll do here is I will put this little be alive caller link right up here. You'll be staged in Backstage, we'll ask you some questions in a private chat to see what it is, and we'll bring you in when it makes sense to do so I'll leave that up here for a little bit.

While we are doing that though, for those of you who are watching live, we'd love to know what's been new in the Human Factors world in terms of news. I know there's some things out there, but I want to source it from you. There's some things that maybe Barry and I can talk about in the interim, but Please leave us a chat with what you're interested in hearing more about maybe starting some spirited discussion across the chat rooms for some human factors consideration.

Barry, you were about to jump into something before I rudely cut you off to invite everyone to become a live caller. What were you going to bring up? Pretty much

[00:15:12] Barry Kirby: that. So no that's all good. I think we were going to potentially, like I said, last time we did this, we were talking about different different areas where you could apply human factors.

And so I was trying to remember how long it is since we've actually done an episode. Whether I'd done a 1202 episode by then, I'm, I, we might not have done so, or I just had one go out. I'm not sure. I was trying to situate. Why don't

[00:15:35] Nick Roome: you tell the people what's new over at 1202?

[00:15:38] Barry Kirby: So having gone from done no episodes at all I've now got three new ones this year which is quite good.

So we've talked medical devices so well, medical human factors with Fran Ives here in the UK, and then I went to Canada. I didn't do it myself, obviously, but I talked to Madeline Chute over in Canada who's an early careers ergonomist. And now I thought it was really fascinating, because I assumed that Obviously, HF is quite big in the is big in the States.

I assumed that Canada, just being over the border, that it would be in a similar sort of situation that they would have, defined human factors within the industries there. Turns out, no. There's the human factors domain is a comparatively few and far between. And given what I've wanted to visit, if not moved to Canada for quite a long time, then that made me think, is it worth going over there and starting the ergonomic boom in Canada, realize that actually to have the human factors there, you've actually got all the industries to go and do human factors too.

And I definitely don't know enough about that. And I think my kids would also be quite upset if we, if they came home one day and we just emigrated without them knowing. Some might say that you should take the children with you, then the one that's just gone live last week was all about air traffic control which is really cool.

So I learned a lot more because we not only had a, the head of human factors on there, but also a, an air traffic controller. And she gave us massive amounts of insight into what it's like to be an air traffic controller. And she seemed to really enjoy the job given she'd been doing it for 26 years.

And a lot of people who apparently, once you become an air traffic controller, it's actually comparatively rare that you leave. Because it's that sort of role that you just get into and keep doing. And it keeps you engaged and work at home, work work life balance, all that sort of jazz.

Yeah, so a bit of a spread. And then I recorded another one yesterday, which will go live a week on Monday. But what did you pumping out episodes, but in the interim, I've been going crazy on on the likes of TikTok and the, on, on the short form stuff. So trying to get in at least one drop a day to, to try and do that whole regular but often piece.

And that's made a real difference certainly on TikTok and LinkedIn. The engagement has been massive. And I've, one of the tools that we tried out a while ago has revamped itself and actually become useful. So though they've just done another revamp and made it slightly less useful.

Overall, no it's helped quite a lot. Yeah, that's great.

[00:18:04] Nick Roome: That's great. I am let's see here. Hang on. Let's, we got one chat from Neil here. HFES government relations committee member involved as a member of the FAA special panel on the Boeing incidents. A few good call outs of HFE issues identified.

[00:18:20] Barry Kirby: Ooh. So the, presumably

[00:18:23] Nick Roome: that involved doors

[00:18:24] Barry Kirby: and wheels and bolts. Oh my. It's yeah. Cause the last thing I read on that was. The doors didn't actually have any bolts in them, or had very few bolts in them. So then

[00:18:37] Nick Roome: There was something else that happened where on takeoff, a wheel dropped off.

[00:18:42] Barry Kirby: Yeah, and we're just rearing down the runway. Oops. I'm, I wonder if they put the the work experience or the intern on on some of the things just to the fact that the job would have probably been do better than, wouldn't it? But yes. I sense Boeing's not having having the greatest of times of it at the moment.

No, I don't think

[00:19:00] Nick Roome: so. And we have friends at Boeing don't work on the plane. They work on. Yeah. You can't say that. We have friends and we would very much like for those friends to come back on the show. Look, we can comment about it, they just can't when they come on,

[00:19:18] Barry Kirby: but you must be like, to be one of the senior board members or something like that of Boeing, you must be sat there just going over your the morning newspapers or whatever it is, or getting the phone calls late at night saying you know when we thought we'd just got over this issue?

The wheel fell off. Yeah their board meetings must be a treat at the moment. There's a an

[00:19:39] Nick Roome: article from Matador network. I've never heard of them. Boeing's real bad, very ugly, 2024, every incident involving Boeing planes this year so far. January 5, a door plug blows off Alaska Airlines flight 1282 from Portland to Ontario, Jan 9, Alaska and United reportedly lose hardware during inspections of aircraft, January 16, four passengers on Alaska Airlines announced lawsuit Feb 6, United 737 MAX 8 experience stuck rudder pedals March 7 Tire falls off a United Airlines flight shortly after takeoff from San Francisco.

March 11, 50 passengers injured after Boeing 787 Dreamliner dropped suddenly midair. March 9 yeah, where are we? March, geez. March 11, Boeing fails 33 of 89 audits during FAA inspection. March 13, a United Airlines flight has a fuel leak en route from Sydney to San Francisco and is forced to turn back.

March 15, jeez, we're in March 21, Boeing plane arrives in Oregon with missing external panel. Some of these I didn't even know about And this is quite a bit.

[00:20:52] Barry Kirby: Yeah, it'd be interesting to, obviously when you look at Stark lists like that, they look bad, but I guess it's about context, isn't it? It'd be interesting to do a similar comparison to say Airbus or John Douglas or somebody like that, who does that. And A lot of, a lot of that isn't Boeing's fault.

It's ongoing maintenance issues. It's ongoing, with the airline and things like that. But yeah it still is the Boeing headline, isn't it? It's

[00:21:21] Nick Roome: we're waiting for y'all to chime in with news stories, if you want to hear about them I figure maybe we can take a look at some news sources and I'm just going to take a look through here and see if there's anything that catches my eye from a human factors perspective.

Go on. Oh, you do? Okay, great. I'll take a look through here while you're reading that one and I'll take a listen while you're saying that so I can multitask. No, so this is off

[00:21:45] Barry Kirby: the BBC and it's Neuralink video showing playing chess using a brain implant. So in a live stream on X patient Nolan Abar explained that he was playing a game of chess use online, using a device in his brain to move the cursor.

He appeared in the video beside Neuralink's brain interface software lead, Bliss Chapman, and answer the questions about how the technology saying that it required him to Imagine the cursor moving, 29 year old said he'd become paralyzed from the shoulders down after a diving accident. He said the Neuralink device was intuitive and his experience using it was wild.

So there is a bit of a video here, which I won't play. Cause I think it'll overdo my my thing. But that sounds quite cool. We've talked about brain implants in the past and to have something Or looking like it's working now is quite the deal. I wonder though,

[00:22:40] Nick Roome: like it feels like this has been done before there's been brain controlled.

So here's something from Associated Press in 2015 brain controlled chess is here. There's a BCI based on a T so I like, I don't I wonder if this is in the news for who's associated with Neuralink rather than the technology itself, and I'm curious to not necessarily have that discussion, but what is new here that is happening?

Is it based on because I'm looking at this article from 2015, 15 Hold on. Let's see here. There's several in here.

[00:23:17] Barry Kirby: What seems new? It might just be new to me because the way that they're describing it, but every type of brain interface device that has been done so far has not really been a link to, let's say a thought.

Around the action you're doing, you just have to do a certain type of thought in order for you for the brain to fire in the way that does to translate into movement. So where I've seen them do the interface stuff before you, you maybe think yellow. And that will cause the drone to maybe go up or down or something like that.

This way, where he describes it saying, imagine the cursor moving. That for me sounds like it is more in line with what you'd expect to a brain interface device to do. To actually do it. Oh, my camera stalled again. Genius. I'll reset that in a second. It, this feels like it's more of a it is more along the way where I expect, or you would naturally expect a brain implant to be for you to say, you to imagine go up, down, left, go, go there. This feels like it's progressing along that line. But you're right, it might just be a similar technology with because it's

[00:24:28] Nick Roome: what it's doing. It could be but again, at the same time it's also interesting to think about the, how do I even phrase this?

It's

I'm trying very hard to not talk about the personality behind it, because I don't think that's the interesting thing here. For reasons that we probably discussed during the Cybertruck episode. So go back and listen to that if you want to. Get at what I'm trying to get at here, but I think the interesting thing to me is that because of that personality associated with it and because of this.

Pop culture piece of it, we're starting to get really salient human factors issues being reported on like a BCI is being reported on, that's cool. That's not something that, there might have been a headline about it, but I feel like this has been everywhere. And from that perspective, I can appreciate that Yeah, the what's new is interesting to me.

If anyone knows, if anyone in the chat knows what exactly is new about this compared to potentially older BCIs, that would be that'd be great for you to chime in on

[00:25:34] Barry Kirby: that. So I've just found a slightly more detailed article. So yes, on X he was playing chess and demonstrating that. He's also managed to use it to play the video game Civilization.

It does say it's not perfect. They run into some issues, but this is quite interesting. The device itself is about the size of a one pound coin and is inserted into the skull with what microscopic wires, which can read the neuron activity and beam back a wireless signal to a receiving unit. So it is still a basically read only device.

We know that the ambition is there to do almost the two way. Transmission of data. But yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:15] Nick Roome: Tell me when we can write to a brain. 'cause that'll be scary .

[00:26:19] Barry Kirby: What

else have we got? Oh, that's quite cool. So we always like to talk about ai, don't we? And subtype. This is quite a good one. An AI tool tested by the NHS here in the UK successfully identified tiny signs of breast cancer in 11 women, which had been missed by human doctors. So it was a tool that's been piloted alongside clinicians and analyzed mammograms of over 10, 000 women.

Most of them were cancer free, but it successfully flagged all of those with symptoms as well as an extra 11 the doctors didn't identify. That's really cool. And it just shows the value of AI in doing that sort of work.

[00:26:58] Nick Roome: Another article here on AI that, that has captured my attention I'll read the headline.

We can dive into the merits behind it, but AI outperforms humans in standardized tests of creative potential.

[00:27:12] Barry Kirby: Of creative potential. That's something we've talked about in the past, isn't it? About how, does the whole AI art, AI generated art scene compared to human art where is the value in it and what does it actually do?

Yeah, that, that's interesting.

[00:27:28] Nick Roome: Yeah, to, to, for, your camera's frozen again. The three tests utilized in this study here were the alternative use task, which asks participants to come up with creative uses for everyday objects like a rope or a fork. The consequences task, which invites participants to imagine possible outcomes of a hypothetical situation, like what if humans no longer needed sleep and The Divergent Associations Task, which asks participants to generate 10 nouns that are as semantically distant as possible.

For instance, there's not such semantic distance between dog and cat, while there's a great deal of distance between words like cat and ontology. And so those are the three tests, and one of which I can see where it would really excel at, which would be the words, because we don't, Have all those things built into our head.

And so when it has access to those large language models, that type of thing would make sense to me that cat and ontology very distant, and it almost has built in measurements for those types of things that at a base level. It is operating as a very fancy autocorrect, okay? And, er, autocomplete. And when you have that as the basis for that model, it's very easy to say, okay, these two words I never see together.

And so that, measuring that as a creative task, then you have You would have that greater score, I'd think the other two are interesting to me because those should be an average of what humans would respond with if they're not, then I don't know, anyway, interesting article, just something that caught my eye here.

That's from about a month ago.

[00:29:20] Barry Kirby: The UK government is wanting to see the first flying taxes take off in 2026. So a mere two years away. And that's always two years away. Yeah. And it's a magical space because then two years later, they expected to be a regular site. So they've got this plan, which is a future of flight action plan developed with the aerospace industry also says that drones and other flying vehicles will become more autonomous.

It predicts that the first. Pilotless flying taxi will take off in 2030. That's really interesting. It's a great ambition, I think. So I think with a lot of these things, you've got to have the ambition to do it. But I think, I don't know. I just don't feel that the human infrastructure is there to make that work.

There's a lot of invested, a lot of talk around human machine teaming, trust in technology, trust in AI and all that sort of stuff that the, we, our airspace is so regulated at the moment in built up areas and things like that. And we struggle with people keeping drones out of air, out of airspace that they shouldn't be in and regulate and that sort of stuff.

How are you then going to regulate flying cars? And that's regardless of whether, how well they work. It's but, if it does work, then I'll have one from my back garden, please. Because it would make me get into work a lot easier.

[00:30:35] Nick Roome: Take one, one, one, one flying car, please. I'll take that.

[00:30:40] Barry Kirby: With the with the maintenance package, because it's gonna need it.

So

[00:30:45] Nick Roome: Hey, speaking of you, you and I were talking a little bit about medical human factors before this, I feel like it's probably worth it to note that similar to what we have done at HFES in previous years Heidi, friend of the pod, Heidi Heidi Merzad is going to be out at the Human Factors Healthcare Symposium, or I always call it the Human Factors Healthcare Symposium, the full title.

Title is the HFES International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Healthcare. That's actually happening in just a couple days here, March 24th through the 27th at in Chicago. And so Heidi's gonna be on the floor. She's gonna be doing several Instagram Lives with folks From the conference.

And so we're hoping to get some live coverage out to you all. I know she's planning to do some sit down conference coverage as well. So that way that'll be out there on the safe and effective feed. Just want you all to be aware of it. And if you are going to that event, like what is something that you're looking forward to from the healthcare symposium?

I've actually, despite covering the healthcare symposium virtually, I've never been to one in person. And we've always had other folks associated with the podcast go out on our behalf and check out the event. So we've had Elise in the past go out there, Blake has been out to these events. And so we've never actually had any sort of I've never been there.

And so I'm always curious what people are excited for because I know, I hear it's a very different beast than HFES. So if you're going would love to hear what you're excited for. Who are you hoping to see? Who are you hoping to talk to? What are you hoping to learn? And of course, tune in for all the coverage on the safe and effective feed.

I think that about covers

[00:32:27] Barry Kirby: that. In whilst we're talking about conferences in a month's time or just over a month's time, it's the Ergonomics and Human Factors 2024 here in the UK. Which I'm quite looking forward to. I'm taking, I think all of my team to go and do that, which will be good fun.

And unlike the past two years, I've got a paper in the mix as well. So I'm presenting. So I'm quite looking forward to that piece. And we're moving the annual award ceremony to be back in the note because it always used to be that you do, we do the annual awards on the second night on the night where you have the conference dinner as well.

So that was going to be that. But then we have managed to, so for the past two, three years, it's gone virtual, basically since COVID it's been virtual but now we are going back live again and so I get to host it live this year. In person. So I'm quite looking forward to that. Let's try to get some

[00:33:23] Nick Roome: conference coverage out of that.

If we can.

[00:33:26] Barry Kirby: Yeah, this year. You gotta bring

[00:33:28] Nick Roome: Your kit this year.

[00:33:30] Barry Kirby: don't leave it at home in the no. I bought all of it except the power leads. Oh it was the power. It was the power. It was the one, it was the one bag that had basically all of the the transformers in and stuff.

It was like wait. Have you bought that bag up? Oh, . Yeah, that wasn't that. And it was so annoying 'cause I had literally everything else my room was packed full of kit. And yeah, that was just mad. Whether we get to it this year, I'm not entirely sure because I've still got, I'm still doing the whole past president piece.

But next year, all else failing, I definitely want to get some stuff sorted. So we shall see how that rolls. But there's going to be so many, there are so many papers this year, they've had to put on an extra stream. So normally we have three streams going through going through two days.

This year we've got four streams going through, through two days. So that's great in of itself. So quite looking forward to see it, quite looking forward to that. It feels like the actual pilgrimage.

[00:34:23] Nick Roome: That's awesome. I'm looking forward to living vicariously through you as you go to EHF.

I always love hearing from folks who go out to conferences to hear about their experiences because it's just a different It's just so different from the normal day to day, you go out, you see all your all your Human Factors friends, and learn about what they're doing, and feel all sorts of tinges of imposter syndrome, and then really just are like, wow, you're doing some incredible things, and I'm just, So happy to be in the presence of you, or to be known by you.

[00:34:58] Barry Kirby: It's It certainly does that, when you're sat there, and you listen to some of the stuff that people have been researching, or doing case studies, and you're there going, they really humble you. Okay that that's different league stuff. Yeah. It's crazy.

[00:35:12] Nick Roome: It's I just, yeah.

Anyway. Hey, if you're just joining us, I see we are probably at the most concurrent viewers we've ever had live. So thank you for joining us right now. That is quite exciting to me. If you are just joining us we're live. Hanging out. We're talking human factors things. If you've seen anything in the news you want to hear about or hear us talk about or want to bring up anything that you've been working on you can drop it in the chat.

Let us know there. Or if you're brave enough, if you are a brave soul, you can scan this QR code and be sent to our backstage. We will let you in and you can let us know what you want to talk about. And if you If you scan that, you'll see what happens.

[00:35:48] Barry Kirby: So something that's happened in the UK, this in the past few weeks, and I'd be interested in your take on this.

Our whole family have been getting itself into all sorts of knots about photographs, AI and editing photographs. So we've had, member of the royal family, she's been out of the public eye for a bit cause she's had some surgery. And so then on Mother's Day, she had a photo taken with her and her kids.

Cause there's all sorts of conspiracy stuff going on in the background, but I don't really want to focus on that too much. She had this photo and what she then did was use, a phone app to, to touch up the photo. And of course, so then it, This photo got distributed by Kensington Palace and then all of the major Getty and all them who distribute photos put a kill notice on it saying actually you need to stop distributing because we realize that AI has been used or it's been photoshopped basically and therefore have a lot of problems with it.

And so then the princess Wales then came back and said this is a photo I took myself. I'm an amateur photographer. And I touched it up. Yes. I, she didn't do an amazing job about it. So it's interesting having the profile of photo editing where, you know, how authentic photos that we seeing the.

How much are you allowed to, because, all, everybody touches up photos now puts filters on them, et cetera, et cetera. How much are you allowed to do that before it becomes fake? And it becomes questionable in terms of its authenticity. And as, do some people have, do some people have to be more authentic than others?

[00:37:23] Nick Roome: That's such an interesting question. Because I have a rather personal story that I'll talk about here and I think some of this discussion probably happens because of who they are, but here's the personal story and it has to deal with my son who has some pretty bad skin eczema and there are times where it flares up and is worse than other times.

And it doesn't matter what we do, we've tried a lot of different things in terms of medication, trying to get it to stop flaring up as much as it does. It's just something that we lived with. And the personal piece about this is, there's some memories that we want to preserve. Things like trips to Disneyland, or dinners out with the family, or something that we Touch up digitally to remove any blemishes that might be in that moment because we know that as he grows older and is able to maintain his skin, his himself and, hopefully without the aid of medication to curb some of it.

We want to be able to look back on those memories and not remember blemishes or the, oh, that was a really bad flare up day but rather the other memories associated with it. And so I think an interesting argument can be made for intent. What do you intend to do by digitally modifying this? Photo you can say that there are perhaps less genuine or more malicious examples out there of modifying an image to sell a certain product or service that would be lying to consumers or or is it because you have too other techniques of visually modifying things, like I'm thinking about like a hamburger, they perfectly place all those hamburgers and melt the cheese over the side.

And it's actually not even food in some cases, but you present it in that way to sell it. Is that crossing a line? What if it was AI generated? Does that cross the line? And so it's a fascinating question because it's like, where. Is that line? I think a lot of it has to come down to intent. Yeah,

[00:39:51] Barry Kirby: and it's, because I think that's where this one story had come from.

Just taking at it's very base value It had been done, because there had been speculation around how the princess of Wales is and all that sort of stuff. I think it had been done in a way to head off that sort of speculation. And so the photo had been taken and then it had been doctored and nudged there in a way that that you just, perhaps it was naivety.

I would like to think that people wouldn't be doing it unless that the, you that there was nothing other sinister behind it. Cause if it were, if it was supposed to be done in a sinister way, or if it was being done in a sinister way, quite frankly, there are people who are way better at it and wouldn't get caught out in such a such a rookie error for want of a better expression.

I think by the fact it is it has been done so badly in, in that respect that actually that means it's, it's an innocent mistake rather than something something intent. Equally, not one to push conspiracy theories, but that could be a double bluff. You know that they've done it to make it look bad.

So you think that it's an innocent mistake, but I think that's possibly taken that too far. But who knows? We'll see how it goes, but I just think it's really interesting. It, like you say, where you've got if your intent is innocent enough and you're just doing the thing, then That's fine, isn't it?

And I guess you've got to be comfortable in your own skin with what you're doing and you're doing it for the right sort of reasons. But it does go to show just how much you can edit photos and how much almost you, you build a sort of relationship with the consumer of the photo. And does it matter? It goes back to the, one of the comments we were making earlier about you using AI to generate art.

And whether we believe that generate art generated by AI is valid and useful and has a place. Because a lot of artists feel that it's taking, it's taking basically money out of their mouths. It's out of their pocket because it's a, it's not emulating their art style.

It's yeah. It's leaning into them, isn't it? Even if only minutely because it's learning from everybody. And then generating something, but then. It's also about what is the, what is in the eye of the receiver because my insight into this has changed dramatically over the past three years with my eldest daughter going to university and studying art and seeing so much more with what she does and what my younger children do around the journey they go on.

And so it's not just about the piece that they produce, but it's the journey they got to get there. Which is fine. And with the stuff that I've seen from them, I now. I appreciate that a lot more, but equally, if I'm passing, I've seen art on the internet, I'm seeing art in a shop or something. Maybe, I just think I like it cause it looks pretty, I don't really think about the, what's gone into the background of it.

Why it's been developed the way it has just looks all right and wouldn't look atrocious on my wall. So yeah, where is the value in art?

[00:42:46] Nick Roome: It's an interesting question, because with art in a lot of ways that is subjective but then we talked a little bit about AI in healthcare earlier, and some of the interesting things, even with an article that you brought up earlier with breast cancer screening.

Yep.

That's we're trying to save lives with that type of technology. Yep. Like that is the intent. Does it take away from the doctors? No, I think it actually enhances their capabilities. They're still capable of detecting. It just might be that. An AI system is capable of detecting a little bit more and forces the doctor to go back and take a second look.

Probably still requires human diagnosis and it's just it's fascinating when you think about all the different applications and how some might be more socially acceptable than others. And it's also interesting on where we draw that line of what is acceptable.

[00:43:47] Barry Kirby: Yeah. And I don't think there's any one answer to that at the moment.

I think we, as we use it more, our perception of it is going to change. In fact, I was in a meeting where we were talking about pretty much this very thing. About how our acceptance of AI is going to change and evolve. And I keep on likening, likening it to the way we use satellite navigation. So sat nav, like Google maps or Apple maps or whatever.

When we first started using them systems, we dived into it and really got into we, we we got into it and it really played on the would set out the route and you'd sit in, you'd dive into it and go, how did you get that route? How did you get, you'd want to know the full ins and outs of it and whether you could choose something else and that type of thing.

Whereas now you just choose a route. You do, it gives you your route and that's fantastic. You rarely go in and, dive into change the route because you trust it. You trust the process and AI is pretty much going to get there where at the moment we are very keen on we want to know exactly why it made its decision, how it made his decision in many ways.

We hold it to a higher standard. We're saying it's it is a replica of human intelligence, whereas we know that human intelligence can be fallible. We hold AI to a higher standard that it should never, ever be wrong. I think that may change, evolve, or whatever. We'll see how that plays out.

But yeah, I think when we're talking about this, say, in 10 years time, we are going to be talking about it in very different ways to what we're talking about it right now.

[00:45:16] Nick Roome: No, Barry is not intentionally frozen. Actually tech support. Nick is going to jump in here. Barry is your camera plugged into a hub?

It is, but it's always been plugged into a hub. So let me tech support here really quick. So if this ever happens to you anyone whose camera freezes, I want you to quickly do a search in the bottom left hand corner of your windows computer. I don't know about Mac for device manager, Barry, could you bring that up really quick device manager?

Okay. You are going to look under USB or sorry, universal serial bus controllers for your hub. And once you think you've found it, you might have to go through a couple of them, right click on it, properties under power management, make sure that allow the computer to turn this device turn off this device to save power is unchecked.

You might need to go through a couple of hubs if you have a couple of different hubs on there, but just make sure that's unchecked because what's happening is that sometimes your computer might turn off that hub to conserve power. And if your camera is connected to it and requires power, that might be what's happening.

There we go.

[00:46:31] Barry Kirby: If I've got a leap, why haven't we got some of the hubs?

[00:46:34] Nick Roome: I know I have a lot too. And sometimes it's just USB devices that are recognized as hubs. Yes, that's true.

[00:46:40] Barry Kirby: Cool. Okay. I'm just going through and doing that now for

[00:46:43] Nick Roome: everything. I do it for everything. I'm like, why are you doing this?

It's just so annoying. I have to do it for a couple more. Cause I have we'll just take a minute. We'll take a minute to do the allow the computer to turn this off for power management setting. There's gotta be a global setting for it, but I'm not sure where that is. If anyone knows that one,

[00:47:02] Barry Kirby: I think that's them all done.

Awesome. Let's see if I freeze again, because annoyingly, when I was recording the episode I recorded the other day with air traffic controllers from that, I froze halfway through. And if you watch the video, so in the audio, you can't really tell. I've cut the bit out where we say, Oh, look, he's frozen.

And we were still chatting. We were still doing our thing. But in the video, bit, I put some amusing editing on there to goes goes frozen. And then I, so I put some text on there to say, yes, and yes, Barry, there's nothing wrong with your feed. Barry is actually frozen at this point.

And then As it goes, as I'm then just frozen. I put sort of text on there and say, yeah, Barry's whilst listening to what's going on, Barry's frantically trying to work out why he's frozen and how he's going to fix this. I, it's my most humorous edit yet. I think it's very, I think it's funny.

I'm going to watch that later. Yeah. I thoroughly encourage everybody to do so if nothing else just to laugh at my panicking in the background. But I seem to recall previously, then you could have solved it for me, but clearly not.

[00:48:02] Nick Roome: Yeah. I seem to recall at some point us talking, at some point I had recommended a certain episode of a certain television show.

Did you ever watch that?

[00:48:15] Barry Kirby: I can't remember what we're talking about.

[00:48:16] Nick Roome: Is it always sunny? Did you watch that episode?

[00:48:19] Barry Kirby: No, I didn't. No. Oh, okay. I did. All right. Yes. I need to go back and there's a whole bunch of stuff we trying to watch at the moment which doesn't help with the fact I've actually gone back and restarted the West Wing.

Because there's just some times when you've just got to go and so I'd be, I forgot because I hadn't watched it in a while and just forgot just how great a series it is. And I've actually gone in and clipped some, cause there's the one episode that talks about ergonomics. And the value of ergonomics and things like that.

And I've clipped some of them episodes some of them bits to use in future presentations. Because there's just got to be an opportunity to use that at some point.

[00:48:54] Nick Roome: Oh yeah,

[00:48:54] Barry Kirby: there has to be. But yeah no, unfortunately I haven't been out, been and watched that stuff I'm afraid. I will, but I will get into it at some point.

Maybe not today. I am not tomorrow, but sometime. Oh, dear me. It's quite late.

[00:49:08] Nick Roome: It is quite late. I know you had said that maybe we won't go for the full two hours. How are you doing?

[00:49:14] Barry Kirby: I can do another half hour. I think that'll be I think that's good. We've got to ease back into it.

No, it's been, as I was saying to you the other day, we've, it's been quite a rollercoaster, Oh, three weeks. I think it is. Because anybody who's been following my socials and stuff will know that we rebranded my company the other day. Yeah. You want to, you're wearing some swag right now. You want to show everybody?

Wrong side. I've done that before. So we've got a new logo which has the this head, really the K sharp bit all kind of looks similar to what it used to be. But this new logo bit is something I was really quite keen to do because when we first set the logo that we used to have, it was more something generic that if we, I don't think we're entirely sure where the company was going to go and we wanted something that if we decided to flex into maybe a wider systems engineering role or more maybe project management y or maybe a more holistic service that it would cater for that.

It would allow us to go into that no problem. Whereas I think we've got the idea now that, yeah, we, we do this human factor stuff. And so we've changed the tagline because the old tagline was optimizing human potential which would go into anything, whereas now we've just been bold. So we now innovators in human factors just you're admitting it.

But the other thing I wanted was we had the K of the K sharp as that person piece. Whereas now we've, I've got this logo, this person logo, but that's actually got quite a lot of intrinsic meaning behind it. So yeah, it was, we had a local company do work on it with us. And I think it was a slight challenge for them because not that I'm picky or really quite intense about what I'm doing, but they would send ideas through.

And within about. I don't know, 10 minutes, I'd have been through all of their ideas, annotated them all, and then come up with my own slide deck from, based on what they were doing to say I think we need to be going down in this direction because of this reason. And but actually it took about a month, I think it was, of back and forth effort.

And. And yeah, it's all been redone. And then the same company has then done all of our signage. And now we've got a new merch. And so we restocking, but one of the most interesting bits around it was we've had the last logo for around 10, 11 years, the amount of places that you put the logo that you don't realize where you put it.

It's quite phenomenal.

[00:51:38] Nick Roome: I saw the call. I saw the call out on social media. Hey, if you find this anywhere, let us know.

[00:51:42] Barry Kirby: Yeah. And in fact, I've just had another one tonight from I think it said, yeah, you haven't updated your your the Google page for the company. I'm like, Oh, does the, yeah, they still exist, don't they?

And so there's all sorts of bits. And then on, on my, on the 1202 podcast itself, I haven't updated the logo on there, which I realized just earlier.

[00:52:00] Nick Roome: I was just about to say, I have a vintage mug around here somewhere. With the old 1202 logo on it, still, that

[00:52:06] Barry Kirby: has the K Sharp logo on it. That's true, yes. Oh, does the new one, oh no, I don't think we have, do we have new mugs?

What do we do for new mugs for that? Maybe we didn't do mugs. But yes, so we, but then there's the sports teams we've we've sponsored, who now have their K Sharp logo on it. kits in valid. And we'd only just got a new board outside of our local rugby club. And so I've had to get in touch with them to say can I replace the board already?

Because yeah, I've just changed everything. Alex in chat

[00:52:33] Nick Roome: Barry sending a swag. Wow. Amazing.

[00:52:36] Barry Kirby: That was subtle. I like that. That I like the way you delivered that's fair play. As Nick knows, I'm not adverse to sending stuff out to No.

[00:52:43] Nick Roome: No, I was very surprised when I received a package from the UK with a shattered mug.

[00:52:51] Barry Kirby: I'll try to look around and see if we've got any of the new swag around here, but I don't think I do. It hasn't made it to this part of the this part of the house yet. We did have some pens and stuff, but I think that's all still in the house. So yeah, it's but it's been, it was such an interesting exercise because it.

I hadn't realized just how much, how attached I got to that old logo. And the, this idea about ditching it and bringing the new one in was just very much of the, I really liked the symbology and the, all of the bits behind the new one, but I was still very much of the, Oh but the old one it meant a lot.

Yeah, but we, it's that one of these things we have to move on and and do the right things. Yeah. So that, that that's it's been a journey to get that. And then we realized that there's still a lot more money. So we've got like the new roller banners and all that sort of stuff, but there's still a lot more stuff to get.

But good fun. Yeah.

[00:53:44] Nick Roome: I'm just doing a quick Google search to see if there's any images that show up still that's

[00:53:49] Barry Kirby: Oh there's bound to be actually I've dropped, there's not too many, but I'd like to think I've got a lot

[00:53:55] Nick Roome: of them. Yeah, there's still some on your website that are coming up as pictures of a, it looks like a wall in the office space.

[00:54:03] Barry Kirby: Oh. Possibly. Yeah. No, there'll be some from like the news sheets and stuff, I'm guessing. Yeah. So things like that we're not gonna change. That's, that just is. But

[00:54:11] Nick Roome: might wanna work on the SEO of those because those are showing up as the, some of the top

[00:54:16] Barry Kirby: It's one of these things in the grand scheme of things. If the, we don't win a lot, much of our work through our website, shall we say? More things, but it is something that the more, hopefully we will be pushing more things through. Yeah, we shall see how it plays out.

[00:54:31] Nick Roome: All right. I think I'm going to do one more call.

Cause if we're going to end in about 20 minutes, I want to give anyone one last chance here. Once again, if you want to be a live caller with us, sit here. Either camera on camera off doesn't matter to us. You could be a disembodied voice. Maybe even something like. Like this, I'm still here, but I'm a disembodied voice.

And Barry, I think you might be frozen. Dang it. Oh, you said you'd solved it. I thought I did. I thought I did. I'm so sorry, dude. Actually sometimes I have to go in and edit those problems multiple times the. Allow the computer to turn off this to save power. You might want to look at your power settings.

That's all I'm saying. Anyway, if you want to be a live caller, if you want to talk about something human factors related please scan this, we will ask you in a private chat about what you want to talk about, and then we will bring you on. And we got about 20 minutes to do so if you'd like to do that, if you'd like to be part of the show, if you'd like to be part of the conversation or even just tell people about some of the cool work that you're doing, I think that's, we can also platform folks As long as you don't abuse it to sell anything.

I think that's a unwritten rule. If you do, I can turn you off right away. Unless it's really good, then unless it's really good, then we might be like tell us more. And then turn you off as long as we're not getting paid for it. That's payola.

[00:55:47] Barry Kirby: All right. Let's see here. I'll say that.

So we, we did, there was a conversation a long time about like time ago about whether somebody was going to give us electric cars. Somebody's going to drop a couple of Apple headsets, or anything like that, then, exceptions can be made. That's not a problem. Oh,

[00:56:04] Nick Roome: I have some exciting news that so because of this, because of what we do podcasting I've often referred by some of my colleagues to, to do things like voiceovers.

And Quick reference guides type things as the voice let's just, I can't say much about it, but let's just say that there's going to be some like highly visible things within a certain branch of the Department of Defense that has my voice attached to it that I'm Actually excited about.

So that's cool. The mind boggles. Oh, I'll tell you, I'll tell you in chat. But yeah, it's

[00:56:41] Barry Kirby: see, I'm, I think I know what the problem is in the grand scheme of things. Oh, regarding

[00:56:46] Nick Roome: your

[00:56:47] Barry Kirby: regarding

[00:56:47] Nick Roome: your your camera.

[00:56:49] Barry Kirby: Yeah. So the graphics card I've got is not. And then video RTX one, which I know that the camera hub likes it's an older, but it's because I've got my the desktop I've got now is a small form factor one.

You can't decent size graphics card in it. And so I'm toying with the idea of, I might have to upgrade my computer again to do what it is that we need to do. And I'm justifying that by the fact that we do so much of this.

[00:57:15] Nick Roome: I, I also, so hang on I, you bringing up graphics card brings up an interesting question and a space that I've wanted to explore for a while.

Would you want to play video games on this platform and talk about it from a human factors perspective ever? Because I think that might also be an interesting way that we could branch out from what this is if we did that, but it had to be intentional. It would have to be. Talking about it from a human factors perspective, it would not be just us playing video games just to play video games.

[00:57:45] Barry Kirby: From my perspective, I think Alex has just volunteered to do that with you. My, so on that, I think we've said this before. I don't really play video games that much. And that's perfect. I think that's actually perfect. Yeah, I was actually, Alex has just taken the words out of my mouth.

I'm all, all about the Minecraft. So my Minecraft is my go to thing. rather than any, I used to play some games and I would get seriously hooked into them and lose hours of my day. Which is on the one hand, okay, but actually not cool. We could give it a go.

[00:58:16] Nick Roome: It's just an exploration question.

If anybody watching wants to see that, Alex is clearly a yes on this. I, again this would be very intentional. We wouldn't be just playing games for the sake of playing games. We would be looking at these from the lens of human factors practitioners. And talking about, Not only the, maybe, problem spots that we see, but also the genuine good design that we see in some of these systems.

I think that might be a cool, interesting way it could be something different every week, too. It doesn't necessarily have to be the same thing. We could try different things that, it might start with Minecraft, and we might talk about that. And we might talk about other things that we look at from just a high level perspective.

I don't know, it could be a free game of the week or something. I'm just thinking about different ways to explore this stuff that we do. Ooh. Ooh. I just saw that as well. Oh, who's joining us? This could go wrong in all

[00:59:17] Barry Kirby: sorts of ways. Oh, this

[00:59:18] Nick Roome: could be interesting. Oh so that, that could have been that could have been.

Oh, okay. We have somebody in the background here. Hold on.

[00:59:25] Barry Kirby: Once you've covered,

I'm currently, I just found another bunch of USB places to switch off power management. So I'm hoping that what I've done is switch off all power management planning to my to the camera. So it might not freeze again, which will work right to the point that.

We'll we'll see how that plays out, but going back to the Minecraft thing. Yeah, I, what I like about the whole Minecraft piece is that you can pick it up really easily. Whereas I was playing Valorant quite a lot. And Valorant, if you're playing it for for, for the competition, not sort of competition pieces, you lose 40 minutes.

And you can't drop out because obviously then you get banned and With all that sort of stuff. Yeah,

[01:00:09] Nick Roome: We're talking about it. Let's bring in our guest, Alex. You are live with us now. Hi, welcome.

[01:00:15] Barry Kirby: There you are.

[01:00:17] Alex: So because you've ventured into gaming and one Minecraft excellent media to utilize in terms of human factors, like explorations, not only between the engineering that you can control within the game itself, but just, generally.

I have recently which these things have existed for a while. They're getting much, much better. Accessibility in video gaming has now come to an insane pinnacle of things. I personally follow streamers that are quadriplegic, that are fully capable of playing not just games like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, simple or more simple side scroller type of things without a lot of, risk in the game, but games like Call of Duty, games like Fortnite and things like that, utilizing these accessibility tools.

And I would absolutely love to see Those accessibility tools. explored. We've spent so much time focusing in multiple episodes on where, technology is initially created for medical purposes and then shifts into like governmental purposes, which then skyrockets pricing.

And I have a vested interest in accessibility devices being actually accessible. To disabled persons to medical need crowds. I'm so for it, and would love to participate in that alongside these things, and Barry will teach you the games. It's okay.

[01:02:03] Nick Roome: You can learn and you're frozen once again, Barry, but

I think that's a great, that's a great point, and I think you bring up some really good, Potential for being able to explore not only the hard, the software, but the hardware as well.

And for someone who's not physically disabled, it would be interesting to see how those how those devices translate for folks like us to write. I would love to know what I could do with a foot pedal in the game. Or, just being able to hit something else that's off to the side and really take those devices and dissect them and maybe even literally do a breakdown to see what it is that we could potentially make.

Part of the part of the things that are so appealing of those accessibility devices are mostly that they're built off of a hub and there's different interaction elements that you can use. to customize your control. And so no matter what shape or form your body is, you can modify that controller to be adaptable for your environment.

And. You're right, they're treated as accessibility tools now but could there be greater application of those types of control mechanisms to other applications as well? Welcome back, Barry. Sure.

[01:03:33] Alex: And then you also I can't think of what the name of the technology is right now. I've been seeing it everywhere.

It's like a new development in VR the floors that you can install. Rambler. Yes, and seeing kind of what Disney put out recently and things like that amazes me. I don't think I'm coordinated enough to attempt utilizing one of those things without injuring myself. But that's amazing and cool.

And also has further implications beyond just existing in what turns into a 4d. Space, I don't know if either of you have come across this, it's a, it's like a scent hub thing where you can sink it into your video games and it puts out the smells of gun fire, and

[01:04:28] Nick Roome: I know what you're talking about.

Yeah, it's it has these cartridges that you load up and It allows you to smell the things that you're experiencing in VR. And I think, I feel like we did touch on that at some point, whether it was in a pre show, a post show, or a show itself. I know we had talked about that, and it might have been in one of our annual roundups.

[01:04:50] Barry Kirby: I think it was, I think we, I'd say this hits with some of the work I'm actually doing at the moment with some project work around the power of scent and things like that. And the, some of the devices now that you get, I think we have talked about before because, the ability to take your gaming or any sort of virtual experience by combining multiple sense input having something else around.

That's why haptics works quite well is because you're triggering a number of different things and the scent is just so powerful that if you can get that nailed, so it truly works. Gun, gunfire or gunpowder that type of thing is a comparatively easy thing. Cause you're, it's largely one set.

Yeah. And it's one thing to push out there and you only have to get a bit of it to be okay that, that's gunfire that, that's really cool. But it'd be really interesting to when you're walking through maybe like complex domains, which might have flowers and things like that.

If they could really get into all of that would be really neat. But I think we're away from that at the moment, but I don't think it's as far away as we think to dynamically generate smells. Very interesting.

[01:05:56] Nick Roome: Thank you, Alex, for your call. We'll go ahead and put you backstage. If you think of anything else, let us know.

I think we're going to start wrapping up here. So thank you. If anyone else wants to call in, I think we may have missed our boat for this week. You can always leave us a voicemail. There you go. QR code up there. You leave us a voicemail on our website.

We'll see all those. But to wrap us up for this week, I think interesting space to explore potential there. Let us know what you think of those ideas that Alex was bringing up, especially exploring the space between some of those accessibility tools as they relate to gaming, but then also how we can expand those out to other platforms and how they can be used elsewhere.

Would you like to hear us? Talk about games from a human factors perspective. There are many talented people who work behind the scenes on some of these products and services. I feel like it's also another way to expand the type of thing that we do on this platform that, that is maybe perhaps a little bit more visually appealing than just watching two pasty white dudes talk about human factors.

We can only do so much. Let us know what you think about that idea. We're going to keep exploring different ways to alter this format. I feel largely that the podcast right now is in a phase of discovery or rediscovery of what this ultimately is. I think. Podcasting is one thing that's an audio medium, and we've traditionally made the show for that format.

I think there's a lot of things that we could do with multimedia that is exciting to me, that I would like to explore. If you have ideas on that, let us know. We could also just keep being two pasty white dudes talking about Human Factors news, that's fine too. Really my goal for this, whatever this thing is to be a hub for the community to get together, to talk on a semi regular basis about some of the challenges, some of the things that we're facing as a community.

Because you don't see a whole lot of human factor stuff like this out there. There are stuff out there. There are things out there, of course. Other podcasts, one of the hosts is sitting right next to me. But, I think, to me, the interaction piece, the getting folks involved and really trying to make this a truly interactive multimedia type of thing for human factors as a potential Anyway, I'm getting way off my, like I'm getting way off of what I wanted to do initially was to round us out and in the show, but I don't know, I'm getting philosophical here and would be curious to what you all think of that type of approach.

[01:08:33] Barry Kirby: Something that hit the wires this week that I think people talking about being a hub for human factors music time stuff, there is going to be another They're going to be a new Human Factors podcast in the mix. So it's going to be, it's called Human Human in the Loop by co with Adam Smith here in the UK.

And I can't remember the name of the person who he's co hosting it with. Where I should find that. Oh Rian Williams Kingley. They co chairing this. So they've put a a trailer onto Spotify, which you can get through LinkedIn and stuff. But go and have a listen to it because they've, Adam also is really into doing his own music.

So he's actually created his own jingle and recorded it. Created the theme tune, sing the theme tune. All that sort of stuff. And just the enthusiasm in it, I think is, it's next level. It's brilliant. Bit of a promo for that. Go and have a listen. And I'm hoping that once they get their first, I think their first episode go live either this week or next week.

And so it'll be interesting to listen in and see how, see what their take on it is and how they do it.

[01:09:37] Nick Roome: Yeah. Yeah. I, and look, there's always room for more in this space. We've always been actually, Barry and I met because he was watching. You also at office hours at Twitch one, one day, and we just messaged and now here you are and I can't get rid of you, but the but there's always more room for this and you know what, if this becomes the hub for like podcast hosts to come and talk and promote their stuff and the pod of pods, if you will, I don't care.

As long as it's entertaining, as long as it's informational, as long as people are getting value out of this that's my goal. And so I would love to have them on if you ever interact with them. I know they're over in the UK, but if you want to invite them onto 1202 and do it, do an interview there.

And if you want to invite them over here to do live panels with us. That's totally cool.

[01:10:27] Barry Kirby: Yeah. We've already had a chat around because I like to do the it's how we did ours, wasn't it? How Podcast Collide.

[01:10:33] Nick Roome: Yeah.

[01:10:34] Barry Kirby: So hopefully going to get them on and do an interview to get in it. Oh, I like doing the whole what's motivated, how, what you want, what you hope to try to achieve.

What cool things you do that I can steal and use on my podcast. Yeah, exactly. Just that stuff. But there's no way I can record my own theme tune the way they have it. It's really good. I'll have to go take a listen.

[01:10:55] Nick Roome: Pod Hub. Pod Hub. The other P Hub. All right. On that note, we're gonna go ahead and get out of here.

Thank you all so much for sticking around with us tonight. I know this is our historical high for concurrent viewership. So thank you. That's exciting to me. That's really exciting actually. So thank you for being a part of that. If You want to get in touch with us, obviously leave us a voicemail.

You can chat us on any of our platforms, send us an email, all that stuff. Take a look through our back backlog category of different things that we've talked about on the show in the past. And of course, let us know your ideas for the future. I haven't done one of these outros in a while. Do you like what you hear?

You want to support the show? Of course, there's a couple of things you can do. Always tell your friends about us. That is the number one way that we grow. You can leave us a five star review. That's free for you to do. You could do that right now. If you want to, we're semi regular now. So I totally understand if you don't want to give us your money, but if you do want to give us your money and help pay for some of the tools and technology that we use behind the scene, Patreon is right here in the lower left hand corner, that is something that we do, we'll always take your money, but We've not really been putting back into that community in the way that we have historically if you're a current patron and want to back out, that's totally fine.

We really appreciate any support that is sent our way either way. I'm really selling it, aren't I? All the links to our socials and website are wherever you can find us. Barry, thank you for hanging out with me tonight. Where can our listeners go and find you if they want to talk more about what you smell like?

[01:12:20] Barry Kirby: That's probably a slightly different conversation, isn't it? Was it only No, that's that's different, isn't it? You can find me on the Human Factors Podcast, so find me at 1202podcast. com, or on socials at Bazzar. k on many of the channels. Only smells.

[01:12:34] Nick Roome: All right, yeah, my name's Nick Roam you can Find me across social media at Nick underscore Roman, of course, right here on our semi regular basis that we do this stuff.

Thank you all so much for being with us on the show tonight. We really appreciate all of you and whatever you're going through in your life. Hopefully it's, there's brighter things on the other side, or if things are bright, then hopefully it stays bright for you. That was not very great at all.

Anyway what do we do at the end of this? It depends. All right. Ready? Until next time, it depends. Thanks everybody. Bye everybody. Bye.