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Surfing the Web Haptically
Chakat sent us a story about Haptic feedback, a buzzword ready technology where the mouse provides tactile feedback in addition to letting you click on your porn. Seriously I would love a bit of feedback when my mouse moves over a button or a link: Sorta like how modern window managers can snap borders to edges of other windows or the screen when moving or resizing... I think that a similar tactile thing for buttons would ease mouse navigation. Or else I can just continue binding ridiculous things like Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Meta-F8 to every little action.
For the 2nd time today.. this HAS been going on for a while. You can make your Windows desktop and website touchy feely using the logitech i-feel mouse. I have one and it actually works okay.
Just improve it a bit and you got it...
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
You can make your Windows desktop and website touchy feely using the logitech i-feel mouse. I have one and it actually works okay.
Got one myself, but there's a drawback: no matter what settings I put it on, it makes my wrists hurt within minutes. I've got the onset symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome, and it's really getting better, but I had to turn off the iFeel feedback. Weird.
What's your damage, Heather?
UNC has been using haptic interfaces, in conjunction with VR technology, to allow [bio]chemists the ability to 'assemble' new compounds at the atomic level. The researchers have grappling arms attached to their hands. The atomic repulsion/attraction is felt by the user, and can be used to figure out how the atoms / molecules should join together.
I think...I think it's in my basement. Let me go upstairs and check. -M.C. Escher (1898-1972)
In David Brin's "Sundiver" they administered a test, where they studied a person's eyeball movements as they were shown a picture. The objects of focus, lingering time, and relative timing of noticing those objects in the first second or two were construed to have deep psychological meaning. The test results were used to determine who was a rightful member of society, and who bore 'watching'.
Obviously haptics is less sophisticated than eyeball tracking, but perhaps not really. Eyeball tracking is straightforward once you have the sensor. Inferring the same type of information from mouse movements seems in some ways more sophisticated to me.
So put on your Gibsonian hats for a moment, and imagine an Echelon/Carnivore-type backdoor *required* in haptic feedback systems. Then have data-mining of that information looking for criminal or terrorist tendancies. Unlikely? Yep. But compared to Strategic Missile Defense?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This would probably be great for reading braille webpages. Otherwise, it sounds annoying.
Well.. maybe if the blind still used braille. It's a myth... They don't... they use books on tape and such these days, it's hardly taught anymore. Braille books are huge and cause portability and storage problems.
It would, however, be a way for the blind to find items on the screen, but it does not and can not match text-to-speech for accessability.
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
That being said, it is really sad to think that there have been few really innovative and memorable improvements to the human-computer interface since the original Macintosh in 1984. (Yes I know Messr. Jobs got it from Xerox - cool your jets flamers. The Mac was the first widely available GUI system. Facts are facts.)
Not only is it time to start thinking more seriously about using the 4 other senses besides sight to enhance the human-computer interface (no pr0n jokes, please - I'm serious) but it is also high time to realize that not everyone has the use of their eyes. This type of interface improvement can do wonders for the visually impaired computer users among us. I'd like to see more improvements of this type.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Perhaps the tech could be developed to feel braille with a mouse.
This is actually a great idea. How about a mouse with a dot-matrix like Braille pad, say, right between the buttons, that produces the Braille character that matches the character under the pointer. Don't forget your patents!
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Ok, the corporation is not run by the church. It is however run by influential church members (plural, it's not just Mr. Marriot), who are generally fundamentalist and extremely conservative. This is of course, mitigated by the fact that Marriot is a publicly traded corporation accountable to shareholders. This mitigating factor probably has alot to do with why you can rent pay-per-view porn in their hotel rooms.
My whole point was that it is possible to divorce oneself of hangups about porn when there is $$ involved. Especially when you're company is in the red. Why not explore all possible markets for your technology?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
hubbabubba
I yam a proud and happy
Fried ice cream is a reality. - George Clinton