Stanford
researcher and iTV pioneer argues for an interactive TV
interface that's genuinely user
friendly.
Diana
Gagnon Hawkins
represents the new breed of interactive media leaders
with the vision and sensibility to appreciate the power
of interactive technology to shape our lives and our
world. She understands media psychology (see interview
with Bernard
Luskin), and applies
this knowledge to designing the user interface for world
class media services, the sort of empowering media
services that (often unwittingly) serve to promote deeper
literacy. Currently she's focusing on the personal video
recorder (PVR). What makes her designs so special is that
she deliberately puts human beings first, adapting the
machines to people so people do have to adapt themselves
to the machines.
Based in Atherton, Ca., Dr.
Hawkins founded Interactive Associates in 1990 as her
consultancy specializing in the intelligent design of
interactive media for all forms of entertainment
programming, Internet TV (Web and email on the TV
screen), interactive TV, virtual reality, and video
games. She's applied her knowledge to computer program
design, prototype product development, business
development, consumer research, and entrepreneurial
company development. An abiding interest is the evolution
of "personal agents" with easily programmable artificial
intelligence, which she says we'll control to make using
the new interactive media networks more reliable and
friendly in daily life.
Hawkins cofounded
Dotcast
in 1999, developing their national high-speed digital
network for distributing digital entertainment,
interactive services and multimedia communications over
local terrestrial broadcast television stations.
Transmitting at 4.5 megabits per second (Mb/s) ) on a
conventional analogue NTSC or PAL signal, Dotcast
transmits at 10 Mb/s over digital terrestrial systems,
adding interactivity to high-definition TV. As American
broadcasters awaken to the potential for interactivity in
their technology (as Europe has long known through
Teletext),
Dotcast and its competitors will gain
importance.
Her clients list reads like a
who's who of the digital media business: Warner Brothers,
Paramount Pictures, Allied Entertainment UK, IBM,
Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu, DEC, ACTV, ICTV, HBO, Turner
Publishing, King World, Nike, Citibank, Kleiner Perkins,
McKenna Group, GTE Main Street, Interactive Channel,
Starwave DBS, EcoQuest VR. She joined Peter Gabriel in
creating an interactive cable show, developed an
interactive version of Jeopardy, joined GTE Imagitrek
creating Discovery Network's hybrid iTV trial, worked
with the team developing an interactive cable channel
prototype for MTV during Viacom's Castro Valley trial.
She subsequently designed interactive services for the
Homecast Network, a joint venture between TCI, Bank of
America and Intuit as a broadband financial channel for
TCI digital cable systems (just before sale to AT&T).
Another client, less recently, has been 3DO, owned by
former husband Trip Hawkins.
Diana Gagnon prepared for her
lifework in new media with a 1981 BA in psychology (Summa
Cum Laude, Psychology Award) and BFA in studio art,
sculpture, and video (Magna Cum Laude) from State
University Of New York (SUNY) in Buffalo. She went to the
Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass,
earning a 1986 Ed.D. in Human Development, Educational
Media and Interactive Technology (graduating with
distinction), specializing in the influence of videogames
and interactive media on thinking. She served her post
doctoral fellowship at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge,
focusing on the future of interactive entertainment
technology, cofounding the Media Lab's interactive
Audience Research Facility. Leaving MIT in 1989 and
moving to the San Francisco Bay, she soon hung out here
shingle as Interactive Associates. Building on her 1989
research for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to
study the potential for an interactive TV service for
children, in 1995 as a visiting scholar at Stanford
University, Department of Communication, she researched
interactive violence and interactive rating systems for
home control of the media violence shown on screen - an
alternative to the V-Chip.
Diana Hawkins was among the
media visionaries I was privileged to interview for my
"TV Visions" column, written monthly from 1995 into 1997
for the weekly faxletter of the late and lamented
Interactive Television Association (ITA), a sad casualty
when the hype balloon popped on the iTV market, as it did
for many dot coms recently when the Internet hype bubble
burst. When we spoke in 1996, the the iTV industry was
declining just as the Internet was exploding into public
view. Her insights into Internet mania and the future of
interactive television are as timely and telling now as
then.
.
Freed: I want to play
time traveler with you, asking you first to jump ten
years into the past and then jump ahead ten years before
we look at the choices we face today. Sound like
fun?
Hawkins: Yes, but I'm
really bad with years. Five or six years ago, I was doing
the talk circuit with overheads saying that by 1995 we
would have interactive TV in our homes. So I was way
off.
Freed: According the
April ITA report on trials and rollouts, plus my own
research, I've counted 125 past, present and announced
interactive TV projects in 88 different markets.
Hawkins: But a lot of
those are not really interactive TV. My definition of
real interactive TV would include the Full Service
Network in Orlando, or the US West and the Cox Cable
trials in Omaha, the ones with movies-on-demand,
games-on-demand, interactive shopping, interactive
information services. In my view, interactive TV is not
any one of those above services. It's a package, a
combination of services. One of the things nobody's done
is put all the different types of services into one
package.
Freed: Do you think it's
possible that there might be any particular "killer app"
or category of content that could be catalytic for
popular success?
Hawkins: Ah, catalytic? I
think there's different markets for different things, and
you can measure them by how much money you make or by how
many people use it. But it's hard to judge. We put
together a chart a number of years ago to project what
the potential market would be. We looked at the existing
market for movies, the existing market for games, the
existing market for catalog shopping and then
extrapolated where those markets might be in the
future.
Freed: You mean your 1985
report, which is a good starting point for us. What did
our interactive future looked like back then, more than a
decade ago?
Hawkins: Back in 1985,
interactive TV consisted of two options. There was
branching video like the ACTV system, or else play-along
systems like Interactive Network and TV Answer. There
were earlier trials, too, like Warner's Qube,
and J.C. Penny's interactive shopping service.
But even before that, in the
early 1980's, or maybe earlier, was a trial in Japan
where they wired a little town with fiber optics and had
full interactive TV. Their interface wasn't as
aesthetically pleasing as what we're doing now, but they
had all the exact same kinds of services we're talking
about doing now, and more, like two-way video town
meetings.
A group of social psychologists,
did a two-year study of the network's impact. No
surprises. They found it was very positive for the
Japanese town, that it sponsored a greater sense of
community. But the project was too expensive and too
technologically advanced, so it went away. And only now,
after being way ahead of us, is Japan looking at
interactive TV again.
Freed: Well, is there
anything going on today that looked impossible back
then?
Hawkins: Nobody in 1985
thought we'd compress video the way we're doing now. We
thought it would be much farther in the future.
Freed: Okay, so now let's
look into the future, ten years down the road. What might
happen tomorrow that looks impossible today?
Hawkins: With the
Internet craze and the online mania in the press, a lot
of people actually are starting to think interactive TV
isn't going to happen, that it's all going to happen
online on our computers, and I don't agree with that at
all.
I do agree that the Internet is
a good way to prime the pump and get content providers
started, but I think the bandwidth of online services is
still too narrow, still too slow, too difficult. These
services may be fine for technophiles, but you have to
remember that the online community is not the mass
audience.
The vision of interactive TV as
a mass media product for the whole population, the whole
family, is not the same as the vision for the online
services. Even with colorful browsers, you're starting
from an environment created for a computer in your
office, which isn't the same as a product going into your
living room where the whole family sits around.
Freed: Could interactive
TV companies counter Internet mania by touting the
findings from their trials? Time Warner will put those
lessons in Orlando to use elsewhere.
Hawkins: Perhaps, but the
bad news is that most data from the interactive TV trials
is being kept proprietary. I still want to do side-by
side comparisons of the interfaces, for example, distill
what's known in the interactive TV community to date so
that we all can design our next set of studies based on
what we've already found out. But the companies I've
asked are amazingly reluctant to share any information,
even from tests that were over and done with years ago
[still true].
Freed: Yet we keep
hearing interactive media execs talking about how a
rising tide raises all boats.
Hawkins: Then let them
share their information so that we all can go forward.
Now that broadband networks are coming closer to being in
place in all markets, network providers need to get the
content providers into mass production. But the content
providers are faced with a real problem, how to make
something that runs on all the platforms, and that means
getting ahold of research data. Without that data, we're
constantly reinventing the wheel.
That said, let me make clear, I
do think interactive TV is going to happen, The first
round will have a graphical interface, and that will give
way to voice activation, intelligent filters and
interactive rating systems with smart personal agents.
Freed: Which raises the
issue of viewer control over content. Until we have
'agents' with artificial intelligence filtering out
unwanted content to match our personal preferences, what,
if anything, can be done about media violence?
Hawkins: We have 20 to 30
years of research that links exposure to media violence
with increased aggression, and at this point there's very
few people who will dispute it, other than those paid to
dispute it.
Freed: The central issue
may be presenting violence as the first or the preferred
solution to problems rather than as the final last
resort.
Hawkins: That's true, and
even worse, on a simplistic level, after a while, when we
see violence in real life, we are desensitized to
people's pain. The scarier part is that a lot of people
enjoy that adrenaline rush, kind of like going on a
roller coaster ride. Of course, it's infinitely harder to
create something that makes us cry, that makes us laugh,
that makes us think, than it is to make something that
makes our adrenaline rush.
Freed: And you have to
keep raising the threshold to keep stimulated.
Hawkins: Right, and
that's why the violence gets more and more graphic. And
now comes interactive violence. As it gets more
realistic, instead of just watching violence, you're
actually carrying it out, shooting and cutting real
characters with digital audio screams of pain. It becomes
a training ground for aggressive behaviors. You're upping
the ante.
Freed: What's the
solution?
Hawkins: I think content
providers have to take more personal responsibility for
what they make. Nobody want's to deny anyone their
constitutional right to create their content, but
somewhere along the line, someone has to be responsible
for what they're producing and the effect it's
having.
Freed: What about the
so-called V Chip?
Hawkins: I don't know if
that's a long term solution. I think it's a good idea for
now, such as with kiddie porn on the Internet, but I
think a better approach is interactive ratings systems
with real-time editing so I can control for myself the
level of violence in a show. That overwhelmingly was
rated as number one in all of our MIT focus groups on the
kind of interactive services people want. People want
that kind of control.
Freed: Let me explore one
other area before you go. I believe interactivity itself
induces in us an awareness that seems conducive to us
thinking in more responsible ways. Do you
agree?
Hawkins: I definitely
agree. I also think interactivity teaches people to take
control over their lives. If you look at global issues,
like the environment, those problems are too big for our
culture to address right now because individuals feel
there's nothing they can do to change things. The good
news about interactivity is that it means taking more
control over your life. As people feel more in control,
it might move our culture toward taking more
responsibility for ourselves and each other.
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