The authors looked into programs that have been written for religious intent, primarily keeping track of prayer times. Seeing the lack in programs that are visually rich the group put together a program for informing Islams when to pray. The program was for a phone. It has a picture of a mosque silhouette, a sky that changes hue as the day progresses, a sun that travels across the sky throughout the day, and circles in the sky that line up with the sun at times when prayer is supposed to occur. The program was tested with Islamic people and found to not be religiously intolerant. After the field test people said that it was much better than just setting an alarm like most of them had done previously and that the visual reminders were very nice.
This paper is interesting to me. I feel that there is an open field for people to do work in the religious field as far as programming goes. Not many programs are written well for religious intent. But the opening is very limited; all of the stuff that I see as being developed are more app styled like with the iPhone than anything else. This paper felt more like a gimmick than an actual branch into another field for CHI.
I agree with you about this being more a gimmick that actual research. But then again, we definitely don't see many people making religion focused programs.
ReplyDeleteI don't necessarily see this paper as gimmicky. I think that they are trying to find ways of incorporating technology into religious practices that aren't gimmicky. The whole point seems to be that most of what is out there is poorly designed and thus not widely used. The idea of this paper is to study if these programs can be made more useful and less kitsch so that there will be more people making such applications.
ReplyDeleteThe application is now availabe for download at the iPhone app. store:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.islamtech.net