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
Nature Science Update: Eyes write
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
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
Most programmers really don't need the extra wrist exercise anyway.
I wonder if this will cause your eye muscles to get bigger?
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)
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!
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.
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
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."
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 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...
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.
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
??
:)
Well, yeah, if you was writing pr0n novels, otherwise I can't see why your eyes should go more red than usual.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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
Same here - he has a serious disability and don't loose faith in his work (or life). That he is an excellent scientist isn't that important to me. I admire anyone with such disabilities and still have a hard time figuring out how they can motivate themselves to go on.
To answer your question, yeah, he has been using certain sensors very sensitive to touch on his fingers (perhaps not even all of them and just the thumbs or something like that). But with him possibly approaching the same fate as your friend, this invention could be useful. I don't know if he still communicates with his text-to-speech synthesis connected to very small finger movements.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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
Is it just me or is anyone else noticing that slashdot is posting some old (one day) stories.
Perhaps the editors are typing with their eyes?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
Yeah, I guess the same designer came up with that idea, that figured out surfing the web was the easiest way to do it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
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)
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.
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.
Great, another reason why glasses will forever be a sign of low status with geeks.
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.
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...
Yeah, I think it's a lot like Springer. You know it's going to be bad, but you watch it anyway.
(and, in all fairness, there have been some good articles/threads posted on
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.
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.
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
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...
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...
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