Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions

Re:Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full o... by lotharbot on Thursday May 14, 2015 @11:59AM (#9545875)

Sitting on my desk right now is a long-handled object with a heavy mass at one end, just like a hammer. But the heavy mass pivots in relation to the handle, the handle is ergonomically crafted in the opposite direction from a hammer, and it's covered in buttons. If you try to evaluate the design as a hammer, it's obviously a terrible design -- but it's a pretty good joystick (good enough for me to use, as the 12th best Descent pilot of all time [0].)

What can we say about a designer from just looking at their design? Not much, if we don't understand what their design is for. If we're guessing at intent or guessing at design constraints, there's very little useful we can say, pro or con.

[0] remember Descent? You can still play: http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php

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Re:Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full o... by raverbashing on Thursday May 14, 2015 @01:44PM (#9546432)

Since the subject is the human body, Descent was great, but it caused me major "motion sickness" (not sure what's the correct term)

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Re:Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full o... by lotharbot on Thursday May 14, 2015 @04:22PM (#9547352)

> "motion sickness"

That's the correct term. It's also called "kinetosis" -- it's basically when your eyes and the rest of your body disagree about the way you're moving, and your brain freaks out. (Going back to the "design" question -- we don't know why the brain freaks out, or whether there's a benefit to it, so it's hard to evaluate whether it's actually a good system or not.)

Some people have reported significant improvement by playing with higher resolution, a wider field of view, different textures, or (with VR devices like the Oculus Rift) some sort of persistent viewpoint (like a fake nose).

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