Slashdot Mirror
Type With Your Eyes
hof writes: "Ever wanted to enter text by just looking at the screen? Take a look at Dasher. You enter text by looking or pointing to letters or words which the program thinks you are about to enter. I wonder how this can be optimized for coding -- a break for your wrists, and the code is available under GPL."
Somthing tells me this could be really bad if your girlfriend or wife is standing near you when you have it on and she asks you one of her dumb questions..
Am i getting fat?
Do you want to go to the mall?
What do you think of this dress?
etc etc etc etc...
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/26/068231 &mode=nested&tid=100
Girl: Are you flirting with me?
Boy: No, Im coding.
But how does it play out, if you happen to look at the wrong letter while trying to See the correct one?
Thanks, but no thanks, I'll stick with my broken (Ergonomic) keyboard for now, I can type just fine on it, and it doesn't hurt my wrists!
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
foo post, not first
Nature Science Update: Eyes write
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
This app was posted a month or two ago. It's pretty cool, though, I have the handheld version installed on my iPaq.
Synergy is your friend
Must look really stupid when you try to enter ctrl-v. And don't even mention ctrl-alt-delete ....
Nobody believes the official spokesman, but everybody trusts an unidentified source. -- Ron Nesen
On using this for PDA text entry: here
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
a break for your wrists
/. wrote this, second time in two months it's been posted!
I would much prefer RSI in my eyes than my wrists!
Incidentally, I assume a friend of
...have I seen this before? O yeah, slashdot - news for nerds, posted at least 3 times in 2 months...
Most programmers really don't need the extra wrist exercise anyway.
I wonder if this will cause your eye muscles to get bigger?
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/djw30/images/Gr aduation/david.jpg
Theres the picture of the DAVID guy who's website this is at!! i thought they banned inbreeding in england!!! ahhhh!! i've gone blind!!!!
Yeah, this has been on /. already (slashdot) but I think the part with the eye-typing is actually new.
First of all, I think that it works a lot slower than ordinary typing, especially when done by a trained typist. But more importantly, if you should use this for coding all day long, you would probably feel like you have been in an all-weekend Quake frag fest. The strain on your brain (oooh, it rhymes), especially the visual part, is a lot bigger than if you're working like you do now.
from the article I submitted on the precise same thing, it is said that you can only type a max of 25 wpm. That's great for PDAs or something I suppose, but how can they claim greater effenciency when it's slower than doing it the old fashioned way?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
i already use dasher... this way I can play with my woman's tits and chat at the same time.
oh, this story is a repeat.
A two minute download and install process. A 5 min learning curve and I typed this post using it with only a couple of dead ends making me think. What fun. And Im not even a spazzy!
Using your eyes to manipulate anything
be it letters or carrots
has got to be the silliest thing a person ever tried
along with trying to fly by flapping one's arms really hard.
Manipulation = hands. Ten fairly independent digits...
Adapted and selected for pointing, pushing, probing.
Nah... instead let's use our eyes.
Adaped and selected for video capture.
What's next? Reading with Braille for the masses?
I think even my two feet would type faster than my eyes.
This is just Technology For The Sake Of It.
The Underpants Gnomes of IT.
Step 1: make useless invention.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: profit!!!
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Of course not, dear. And even if you were there would just be more of you for me to love.
Do you want to go to the mall?
Not really, no. I thought it would be nice if we ate out and went to the movies/theatre/opera later. You really deserve to be pampered tonight for being such a wonderful girlfriend/wife.
What do you think of this dress?
I like it. I love the way how it makes you look sexy and smart at the same time.
When a dang popup appears. Then when I look at it to close it it opens up another add. Suddenly I am trying to close all these windows when ADULT ads started to popup. Obviously since naked women are on my screen I look at them. So suddenly I am signed up to two porn sites.
And that is why my screen is full of porn Mr smith. Please dont fire me. Its not my fault. Its this dang thing that uses my eyes to controll the computer instead of the keyboard.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
It's a hoax. I checked. Please ignore this asshole terrorist (Note: not a mere butt-burglar).
I can understand when /. editors double up on stories from long ago and other editors (!). But this is not exactly the case here.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
I know a guy who was born with a serious physical handicap where he has very little motor control.
He cannot write, type, or even speak. For the longest time, he actually used a board covered with the alphabet to 'talk'. He would look at the letters on the board, and you had to decifer what was being looked at. This way, he could spell out what he wanted to say. His parents were quite quick at it, and they could carry on a conversation very well.
He actually upgraded to a pair of glasses w/ a small laser on the frame a few years ago. He could then spell by looking at the keyboard, which was covered with photo-receptors. Then, the computer would talk to you Hawking-style. It was a groovy innovation. It was quite pricey, though.
Perhaps an open-source innovation such as this could open up doors for people like him. It would make equipment used for social interaction cheaper and more readily available.
YU0 R THE WINNAR!!!111
holy shit, you're right! i just checked CNN and its all over the front page!
Got a link? I can't find it!!! Did the CIA already censor the news?!?!
Try here, here and here
Some sites may be a little slow right now, obviously!
They've found Ashcroft dead in his office, too! The invasion has begun, get your guns, people!
that would be apple?
Not bad for a guy (?) who hangs out on Slashdot...
Imagine taking notes in a meeting, mapping gestures to short cuts...
"Then Bert, bloody hell is this guy boring, said 'I think we should start at the beginning oh for fucks sake and then continue to the end well done sodding einstein' this was agreed as bloody obvious, does that guy get paid for it, well hello nice legs shit what did he say very nice legs up down up down up down.....
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Playing Quake with your eyes is *cheating* !
The Prime Minister's eldest son, Euan, has won a place at Bristol University, Downing Street has confirmed.
He will study ancient history at the university after getting two As and a C grade in his A-levels, plus an A grade in general studies.
Number 10 released details about Euan's education after they were reported by the local media in Bristol.
Downing Street had wanted to keep the matter out of the press.
A spokeswoman said: "Following reports in the Bristol media, we can confirm that Euan Blair will attend Bristol University in the autumn.
"We are grateful to the media who rightfully saw this as a private matter for Euan, particularly in the light of the Press Complaints Commission ruling earlier this year which said that his university application process was a matter for him.
"He is delighted and looking forward to going to a university which has such an excellent reputation."
I ain't kidding either, where did you karma whoring skills go.
Microsoft warns about security holes
First four sentences are:
"
Millions of people using Microsoft's Office and Internet Explorer programs are at risk from security holes that could allow malicious hackers to change files on their computers.
The vulnerable programs include Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, Money 2002, Money 2003, Project 2002 as well as software used on internet servers.
The world's leading software maker has advised computer users to close the critical holes by downloading software patches from its website.
The flaws are the latest headaches for Microsoft, which launched a "trustworthy computing" campaign earlier this year to improve the security of all of its software. "
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
While I recognise the benefits for someone with serious RSI in their wrists (I've suffered, I know what it's like), the additional strain for my eyes would send me screaming.
I don't know how it is for most of you, but I'm extremely sensitive to flicker. Having moved back to the US, I notice the flicker on TV all the time. I notice the flicker on monitors, in lights, etc.
Looking from letter to letter, word to word to type would kill me.
Even if I could get higher than my current 65 wpm, I think the additional eyestrain would cause me to avoid the technology.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
Lazy FDA Approves X-Ray Vision Pills
WASHINGTON, DC--Citing the hot weather and a desire to go home for the day, FDA officials approved American Products Limited's "X-Ray Vision Pills" for commercial sale in the U.S. Monday. "After evaluating this and regulating that for months, we were really dying to cut out early, so we were all just like, 'Fuck it. Let's just approve this,'" FDA deputy commissioner Lester Crawford said. "Besides, nobody could think of a real good reason why X-ray-vision pills would be unsafe."
You'd think something with the name Dasher might be quick
but here we are...
So as you type away, the system decides the set of words you are likely to type next includes "fuck".
How do you stop your eyes immediately jumping to the funniest or most surprising word visible instead of the one you really wanted?
I know I couldn't. Everything I typed would look like slashdot browsed at -1.
(Moderators: for supreme irony please mod this post down to -1)
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
The reason I ask is because I will get annoyed if they tell me "sorry, we're not giving you another student password", so has this happened to anyone?
The best general technical product (imho) bitten by an irritating license that mirrors Wolfram's slightly wild ego...
"Woah, why are your eyes so red?"
Damn pr0n.
Everybody has jumped in so far with the impracticalities of eye-tracking but if you actually read the site, the main use of Dasher is through a mouse or pen, the eyetracking is there specifically for special needs (at 20 words per minute its slower as well but better than nothing if you are disabled). I can't play the demo video (nice one fellow ./ers) but it looks like the guy is stabbing the space bar to select what he is looking at getting over the problems that everyones spotted so far about attention control
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
sometimes the messages here at /. really piss me off. Now here is some really nice idea, a new kind of interface for entering text which is interactive and uses an adaptive, interactive language model. And all you guys whine about is how _fast_ it is!
Please try to appreciate that this is just a try-out for another kind of interface, as an alternative to static, dumb keyboards. Personally, i think that trying to make computer interfaces more interactive, simple, and contex-sensitive is at least as important as the speed at which you can input text. If the horrible colours and wobbly interface (it really feels like some ancient arcade shooter) would be developed into something a little less tiresome to use, i think this might really be of use. For example, what about using it with children that are just learning to write? They have to form the words themselves, but are not limited by their (slow) writing/typing skills... And Dasher teaches you to spell correctly, too...
By the way, i personally know a lot of people who would actually be a lot faster and have more fun when using a dasher-like interface...
Sure this is cool, but I have a better idea... Wouldn't it be neat if you could just speak the words and the computer would understand what you were saying and type for you that way? I think I'm on to something here. I could call it "Talking Recognization." Has anyone else thought of this? If not, anyone want to start a company with me?
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
One of the most interesting features about this is how it "guesses" what you're trying to write. Don't move your mouse, just let it sit there and "type" for you. If you've started typing the first few letters of a word, it will bring the rest of the word up, so it's easier to write.
Believe it or not, the thing actually quoted Shakespeare for me once. I wonder how long it would take to do my homework (correctly) for me...
I watched as a friend of mine succumbed to ALS (Lou Gherig's Disease). She went from being a top notch singer and excellent stage presence to having to type slowly on a keyboard to communicate. Thank heavens that Apple had Text-to-Speech built into their operating system. She could at least be heard, albeit mechanically. In the end, the disease robbed her of even that when she could no longer control her hands.
I wonder if this software could have spared her the isolation of not being able to communicate with her friends and family. I have nothing but admiration for Dr. Stephen Hawking and how long he has held on against this horrible scourge. I wonder if he is using something similar. There are too many people who could really use a tool like this to help them communicate. Just because someone is in a wheelchair (or mechanical bed) and can't speak doesn't mean that there isn't a mind in there desperate to be heard as a human being.
Unfortunately, I can see that there may still problems and issues with input devices like these. Not everyone can hold their eye focus on one point. Maybe the software could be optimized for situations like this. Unfortunately, I'm a terrible programmer, but I'm sure that the Slashdot community represents enough brain power to work out better solutions based on what we have today.
Anyone...?
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Sounds ok for disabled people but I dont always want to select what I am looking at....
From my preferences page: "Anonymous posts start at 0, logged in posts start at 1."
I'm logged in, but my posts start at 0. They usually drop from there, but shouldn't they start at 1? I want my money back!
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
(... and all that in just over a minute!)
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
I think having RSI in your eyes would be worse then in your wrists.
You couldn't just sit down have a beer and watch TV when you're too sore to work.
Did you notice that all the Slashdot editors ever do any more is go out to cnn.com and read the Sci-Tech section? Jeez, I do that anyway and feel so cool for being ahead of the Slashdot "Curve"!
Did anybody else think immediately about Stephen Hawking upon seeing this? I searched the site, and it says in the history that he was originally one of the mein targets for the project. Anything that can possibly help him to communicate faster would be wonderful, as well as for all other disabled people. Nice work so far!
-
While I don't think I want to actually type with my eyes, I have often grumbled after having typed half a paragraph into the wrong X-term that I wanted a 'focus-follows-eyes' mode...
Oh, and the program does not support cut-n-paste, so I have to type the last paragraph again so that I can put it on slashdot!
Basically they use a markov chain which has in it the probabilities that one letter will appear after another. It's very similar to the disassociated press generators you can find out there.
For example, here is one I wrote which generates new random words based on the probabilities of one pair of letters appearing after another pair. I used pairs because it generates more English-like words.
It was "taught" using the contents of /usr/dict/words and written in Perl.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
That must hurt, tapping your eyes on the keyboard to type..
Is it just me or is anyone else noticing that slashdot is posting some old (one day) stories. It is getting worse each day I keep seeing stories I read about yesterday on fark.com. Just a thought.
Part of the speed of typing has to do with the fact that you are using (ok, some are using...) 8-10 fingers almost simultaneously.
Type "a quick brown fox jumps over the lazy sleeping dog". Now, mentally write it by LOOKING at each letter on your keyboard, and thinking 'click' on each one.
1) visually - takes at least 3 times longer, at least for me.
2) doing that for even a few moments is already giving me a headache.
I don't think it's going to be the next 'sliced bread'.
-Styopa
I dl'ed the test and tried it, and frankly I found it to be annoying, innacurate, an eye strain, and MUCH slower than normal typing if you want to avoid errors. Plus it is missing key features such as backspace.
Good idea, bad implementation.
Does anyone but me feel like blowing chunks after a dasher session? I like the speed with which I can enter text, but I feel worse when I leave the computer than after I used to feel after playing Doom II all night.
I submitted this story yesterday morning, as it was breaking over at the Drudge Report. The article there said that people could actually type about 40 words per minute this way, which is a slow down for most of us, but for those not accustomed to qwerty it would be a great, easy way to enter text. My only problem is that this system uses sort of a word guessing technology, such that it would be a pain in the ass if I wanted to enter, say, A$fg^bnp4+ or some other random string, for possibly a password or a software key.
~ now you know
This is obviously a big stress to eyes! If you need to move your eyes rapidly for a long period of time, you will break yourself!
Dude, this would be REALLY trippy if you're high.
;)
Alright, pass me a joint. I'll be happy to beta test this
Perhaps you didn't note this fact from the original Slashdot post:
"a number of choices by flying over them with your stylus (or mouse)."
Sure as fuck doesn't describe a way to look at letters as a means of typing. Before you jump to say dumb shit like "OH, THIS WAS POSTED BEFORE", compare the posts and realize developments make news.
Example of Slashdotter listening to the news:
Newscaster: In a development heart-breaking with enormity, the little girl we've been searching for has been found dead.
Slashdotter: OH COME ON! I HEARD THIS BEFORE! YOU SAID THE GIRL WAS MISSING! I ASSUMED SHE WAS GOING TO BE DEAD ANYWAY! OH COME ON!
Blech.
I can see that there are some good applications for this stuff, definitely.
But for me my brain just doesn't seem to work that way. Whenever I am faced with any kind of autocomplete, I find that it puts me off what I really wanted to type.
Normally I form in my mind the words that I want to type and just type them. Right now it seems that my typing is lagging about 3 words behind what I am thinking. With most predictive systems, the precise words that I want are not there at least half the time. This breaks my train of thought and feels like harder work than just typing.
Maybe I should give in and just accept a faster but more limited vocabulary.
But what could really speed me up in an eye-tracking mouse. Keyboard action applies to whatever you're looking at. Also turns the keyboard into an n-button mouse.
Well I used dasher and I think it's a really neat interface technology (although it made me sort of dizzy first). I can see it's tremendous use for people with physical disabilities as well as for the mobile sector (e.g. PDAs, it's a pain to get text in there with decent accuracy and speed). But in comparison to conventional text input I have to say that Dasher is definitely slower than a keyboard. Since the poster asked about coding, i don't see how to type and navigate with this interface in my text-based source code efficiently at all. On the other hand, someone might develop a high level visual programming language based on a refined dasher-like interface? That would be cool, like looking at the unencoded matrix or something!
I also remember an input technology that could be trained to understand brain impulses. Basically a clip over the finger. You think, "Click," and voila. I recall that the device was being used to also control cursor movement, but it was fairly inaccurate. If it could take dictation with a good deal of accuracy, it would be the next best thing since sliced bread.
... is keyboard shortcuts! :)
"Do it the hard way first, so you can appreciate the easy way later."
While Dasher is definately very cool, this is another dupe story.
2 31 &mode=nested&tid=100
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/26/068
I don't think listing dupes is flamebait either, but mod me down if you must.
I'd think this would be a pain for entering text, because eyes just aren't as much under control or dextrous as hands. It would be better (for most people) to just use a typing method which uses hands but keeps the wrist relaxed.
On the other hand, it would be really nice to use something like this for scrolling and changing pages. That way you could read things without moving anything except your eyes (which you obviously have to be moving anyway). That might actually make it nicer to read text on a good monitor than hard copy, because you don't have to change pages. You just get to the bottom of the page and glance at the corner, and then it flips to the next page. Or you could have the window scroll such that you continue looking at the same line as you move your eyes to the top of the window.
The download is available, to try it with a mouse, so I just downloaded it and gave it a try.
It's -- hard to explain how easy it is to type with it. You get into a zone where your hand moves the mouse at the right letters, and they just flow onto the screen. If you make a mistake, you track the mouse back to the left, and the letters flow off your screen and back into the mess.
When you start to create a full word, it will line up groups of letters, not just one at a time, so you can complete a word easily. For instance, once I completed "fa", I saw "vor" line up in order right next to each other, and when I linked "vor", the two primary candidates were "ite" and a space.
What's weird is that you can forget what you're doing, and the program will just complete words based on the most likely ordering. Oddly enough, I got a sentence like, "What is the physical energy of a botanist" -- just by moving my mouse up and down randomly.
Think of it as a system primed to form sentences *for* you, and you just get to tweak it so that those sentences actually reflect the meaning of what you're trying to say.
Anyway, it's so fluid and predictive that it's scary. More like a ouija board than T9.
Canon SLRs (Elan 7e, EOS 3, Elan IIe, ...) and video cameras have had eye selection of autofocus points for years. It tracks your eye, I think by finding the center of the easy to spot black pupil, and makes the autofocus system sensitive to that spot. Its easy, because it knows exactly where your eye is going to be, right up by the viewfinder. I bet a headset version of this wouldnt be that exspensive - it only adds about $30-$40 to the camera retail price (Elan 7 vs. Elan 7e)
I don't have the exact link, but if you read his website it says that he inputs text with his eyes. It is not as fast as typing with fingers so if he has a speech to make, he queues it up and sends it when he is ready. Then (I assume) he controls the pace of it using the software to stop and start as a real professor would do during a lecture.
at least credit The Onion if you are going to steal their stuff.
Noone seems to want to answer the second part of the post...
For programming, it would have to be integrated with your IDE in an editor which is both syntax and semanitcally sensitive. Dasher uses some sort of a dictionary - usually in English - to predict what the next letter is most likely to be. This is obviously not a traditional dictionary, because it manages to predict across words.
For coding use, the dictionary, instead of being static, should be dynamic. Instead of having all the words in the English language, it should have only words (and symbols) which are semantically valid at the point the cursor is positioned in the edit buffer. Furthermore, it should weight them. Local variables are very likely, method variables are less likely, strange packages even less likely. In fact, it might subcategorise these into pseudo-letters, so that when writing (e.g.) Java, packages would appear as a single pseudo-letter. It could also add localisation-type information - entities referred to within a few lines are more likely to be accessed again soon. This doesn't change the sorting order used by Dasher, which is always alphabetic, but it does change "visual space" allocated to each letter in the search area.
You probably want an auto-beautifier i.e. new lines and indents/outdents are added automatically as needed.
This has some interesting side-effects. For example, you can only enter semantically valid programs. It has implicit auto-completion - once the following letters are unambigous, the remaining characters occupy the whole namespace.
The brackets case is also nice. The only close bracket that is ever possible is the close of the most recently opened, and that often has a very high probablity. Which means that inserting an open bracket implicity "arms" the system with the matching close bracket. The same applies for closing strings - the close string charager is always high probability.
For case significant languages there are some interesting effects. Obviously, in principle both upper and lower case must be present, though it may well be that a small minority of letters are accessible at any given instant. At a guesss, it would be better to split into Upper case and Lower case rather than interleave upper and lower - but that is something to experiment with.
Punctuation-type characters show minor problems - we all know alphabetic order, but does ";" come before or after "+"? I don't know. But I expect we could learn this - there aren't that many symbols.
One could also add a special pseudo-section for language-defined keywords, so you just chose a single prefix zone and then go straight to the set of all known keywords. Usuallly no more than 50 or so, and not usually all semantically valid, so you might get quite quick access to them.
Of course, there is a tradeoff with all these special zones. One of the points about Dasher is that you don't need any more specailised knowledge than having learned the alphabet to operate it. Adding language-sensitive zones and so on adds extra operator learning time. But since you have to learn the language anyway, I don't think it is that much of a burden.
I would expect this sort of strategy to (at least) double the input speed for Dasher for a particular programming language. Forget using your eyes - for the able at least - but it might make mouse-driven program-writing a lot faster. In fact, it might overtake typing for the special case of program input in a "known" language. Though I think the most valuable feature would actually be the inability to input a semantically erroneous program. Which means you "only" have to worry about logic bugs and not typing bugs.
A good place to try this would be to create a jEdit plugin. JEdit already has plugin Java browsers and beautifiers, so a lot of the code ought to be there already. A Java-style Dasher window would be a very interesting project. If anybody feels upt to doing this, I would like to help (I don't think I have got the time to lead such a project).
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Yet another case of Slashdot posting something a day or two after it showed up in Drudge Report (or, say, the NY Times).
Is it just me, or is Slashdot often either "News in Review for Nerds, or Irrelevancies that don't matter"?
I do keep reading it however. Hmmm...
(C)opyright The Onion, 2002
There, do you feel better now?
Furthermore, ERICA is integrated with Windows, so you can use it to completely control the computer and do almost anything you need (not sure how well it would work with Quake ;-) . And just to make it more interesting, it was made by the same guy that made Stephen Hawking's system!
It may or may not be useful for a disabled person, but (even after practice) I think it's slower than predictive text on a mobile phone keypad and handwriting recognition on a PDA. Therefore, I'm not sure whether there will be any useful applications for the able-bodied.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If you typed an entire half-paragraph into the wrong term, you obviously wern't looking at the correct one. If you were, you'd realize that focus is somewhere else after at most a few words. ...don't tell me you're one of those people who looks at the keyboard while typing :P
--
grep "xercist"
Just try it! I doubt that it's going to revolutionize the world of computing or anything, but it's a nice first step in anticipatory interfaces (anyone who reads Infoworld will regularly will know what I mean).
Good stuff.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Anyone with a PocketPC should definitely give the demo a spin. I tried it (last time /. covered this.. hehe), and it's pretty impressive how quickly you can become not just effective, but downright fast.
Go into your slashdot preferences, and set it up so that it highlights all messages (-1 and above), then go to a Your Rights Online rant, preferably one with 500 or more comments, and save the resulting html to the Dasher "source" file.
Once you've done that, fire up Dasher and let the mouse sit in one place. You'll get a bunch of randomly generated Slashdot-esque gibberish.
Fun stuff.
I saw a different version of this for handicapped individuals who cannot use their hands. Though this was on Discovery Channel about 5 years ago. This is just another person who is trying to take credit for it. Though I like the USAF implimentation of it. As you fly your jet fighter, you don't need to aim, you just look where you want to fire and that's where the bullets fly.
It's not like I ever have to type anything in when I'm looking at porn...
Oh, it THAT how you're supposed to type with your eyes!
I'd been doing it by smashing my face into the keyboard! hgyury;elsdrf
Well since I have estigmatism (eys twitch back and forth occasionally) If I wanted to "type" hello it would probably look like this
hertl;k;lppo
I'll stick to my keyboard, thanks.
I have downloaded and tested the Dasher, and I must say that it is extremely useful once you get the hang of it. It is very important, though, that it is trained well, because when you try to type a word it didn't expect or know, you get slowed down significantly. In such cases, it might be helpful if Dasher would not simply order the appearing letters alphabetically, but by their distribution in the chosen language. Other than that, one quickly learns how to use it and gains speed quickly. When using it, you'll notice how very soon your mouse pointer will be moving further and further to the right.
The Jackson Chicago in the plateau must be a citizen.
That's what I got by some random pointing at the letters.
No, I wasn't even trying. Seems to me they've got some hypercool text-prediction algo's out there.
More than mere navel gazing.
Eyes are made for input. I thought about doing something like this, but then I realized that your eyes are made for giving info to your brain, not the other way around. Unless you have a physical handicap that rules out pretty much every other form of interaction, this would not be good for you. Of course, if you are that handicapped, I'm sure this would be a wonderful device.
For the rest of the population, this makes about as much sense as using braille instead of a monitor.
This is just what I need. I figure it would go like this...
Greetings Mr. Smith. I am writing to inform you that pr0n we are still awaiting boobies your pizza response bare behind and I would appreciate your caffinated immediate naked chicks click here to enter attention to this hot lesbian action matter in theatres now only $999. Thank you.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
I just hope they release this for cell phones so I can IM and email without the hassle of pressing the same 12 buttons all the time.
4448#4447777#8444633#333666777#22244266433
IT IS TIME FOR CHANGE
My eye-controlling muscles move much faster than my hand-controlling muscles, and I'm a fast typist. This would mean that I could type faster, just by looking at the screen, or, possibly, at a little card below the screen.
It would be especially useful for writers, demilenization victims, people with advanced muscular distrophy(like Stephen Hawking), or even for people with arthritis. All they'd need would be a visible list of commonly used words, and another list of letters. This would be somewhat like DVORAK. (Indeed, I can see how DVORAK could become popular in the mainstream, this way.)
But when it comes to someone with ADD or simaler (like me), if there's any textual distractions, they're going to be constantly undoing what they've already typed. For public-access terminals, this would be a nightmare. Poorly thought-out handicap laws may one day require this sort of technology at public terminals, for people with disabilities.
What's this Submit thingy do?
When I left most settings alone but set the Caps mode to caps 2 and tested to see which sentence it thought was most likely, it spat out "The responsibility for the state of the state of the state of the state of the ..."
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what about all you all blind ass folks with yo ugly ass wifes?
So what does this thing print when you look at porn? I'm both scared and highly intrigued at the same time.....
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
It's a shame so many people are making fun of Dasher, because this is a promising technology. Believe me, I know--after 20 years as a computer magazine writer and editor (see my bio), I got tendinitis in both hands and can't type, use a mouse, or pickup moderately heavy objects. (Even driving a car sometimes causes my wrists to ache.)
However, thanks to the use of various adaptive technologies, I can use a computer pretty well, and I am always interested in technologies that might help me to even better. In case you're interested, here's what I use:
* Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 6.0
* SmartNav no-hands mouse movement device (http://www.naturalpoint.com/, highly recommended)
* a homemade switch for pressing the mouse button (foot pedals don't work for me)
The SmartNav device allows me to move the mouse cursor by moving my head about 2 inches off center in each of the compass point directions. Using it and my homemade switch, I can move and select down to a single-character level, which is a real lifesaver--you can't do it all with voice recognition, believe me!
Please contact me personally if you're interested in the subject of adaptive technologies or if you hear of something new. I particularly interested in technologies that would make it easier to program (I know about the Programming by Voice extensions to Emacs--which I can't get to work reliably). Thanks.
Wake me up when they figure out how to type with closed eyes.
yeah, plus there's the fact that you have 10 fingers and only ONE focal point... and your hands are waaaaaay faster than eyeballz will ever be for shiznat like typing. I think the purpose of this is to help crippled folks surf the 'net more effectively. I think. It's a pretty stupid idea for the rest of us, excepting only those who type at 4-5 WPM..
As someone already mentioned, you should download the demo and try it... it works perfectly well with a mouse. It's also quite fun :-)
They quote about 30 characters per second... not a great typing speed, but passable for most things. And for some people with disabilities, I can see this being very useful.
I'd be interested to see the reaction of someone who can't type... er... anyone?
They have a program with which one can select the letters using a mouse in an effective and probabilistic manner. The next steps:
1. Develop a monitor which can detect light pointed at it (such as lasers).
2. Develop little lasers which can be attached to one's eyes and which indicate to the monitor which way you're looking. Make them strong, or else the monitor will get confused in the sunlight.
3. Throw away the monitor, show off with your powerful "laser eyes."
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You can only download binaries. Asside from a vague promise to release the source in late summer, there however is no source available now.
Yet it claims to be under GPL. A GPL'd binary? Yeah, right.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
If you day dream and stare off like I did you will get something like this:
realiserson module axiomsy i rendering the sysxagkhbokofieffcvoc with he
The sad thing is that that is pretty much what I wanted to say...
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
Adding focus-follows-eyes as a focus strategy is a poor approximation of the true pinnacle of X focus rules 'focus-follows-brain' in which the window manager arranges for focus to be given to the window you think has focus.
This satisfies the HCI principle of least surprise, because you will by definition never be surprised by this strategy. It is also more efficient than sloppy focus or even 'focus-follows-eyes' because it allows the operator to do lightning fast focus changes without losing track.
How many of you type while looking elsewhere? I know I do so all the time, and even if I just glance away for a moment a simple 'focus-follows-eyes' will be more frustrating than any 'click-to-focus' or 'root-gets-focus' strategy.
So we have to hold out for the big prize, focus-follows-brain and not accept anything less. A decent implementation will follow the brain not only to a window, but to individual graphical elements like entry widgets and this textbox.
I already undress with my eyes, so why not type?
--
"All art is quite useless."
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
Try it for a half hour. It's euphoric.
We are just one step closer to becoming one with our computers. I started using this and I kind of slipped into a trance, and my hand started to naturally, instinctively move the mouse in response to the letters my brain was thinking. I'll have to write a letter to a friend using this. It would be a practical purpose for it.
-Evan
Since Dasher seems to be targeted at handicapped and/or paralyzed users, it might go well with another alternative input software called "Nouse".
Nouse is a nose tracker that requires only a USB camera, and can move the cursor based on head movements. Obviously both packages need a bit of polishing but it's an interesting possibility (look ma, no hands!).
If you have not tried it you need to. Give it an honest 10 minutes then crank the bitrates for a little speed.
It allows you to feed it training files in order to better guess what you might be inclined to express. This has interesting applications aside from alternative input methods. Seeing many choices at once put me into sort of an eerie creative process.
For some interesting results, throw a little short fiction or other creative text at the program, then let your mind wander a bit while using the interface... You may find yourself creating some interesting sentences.
I found that it had some side effects on me after using it for 20 minutes or so. When I went back to normal reading, I expected to see words move --wierd.
Anyway, this is creative software that is worth a few minutes of play time.
Blogging because I can...
Ok, after reading the hype on the site I figured, "what the hey" and downloaded. I thought, hmmm let's try to "type" a word... for some reason the first word that I thought of was 'application. don't ask me why. well, I moved my mouse to the 'a' and proceeded to look for the 'p'. However, I honestly could not find the 'p' for the life of me. (remember, this is my first time) Anyway, after frantically searching for a few moments, I glanced to the left to see what the word said. To my surprise, it was 'application'!
I am almost afraid to try it again...
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
I'm just trying out dasher to type tis comment and it seems real cool. OPne problem is that you cant go back and fix your mistakes like the "H" I missed and a missing period...
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org