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Peephole Displays
benh57 writes "A student at Berkeley has come up with a novel approach for navigating small handheld displays. In effect the display is a "peephole" into a much larger information area. You see different parts of the display by moving the handheld around - no more tiny scrollbars. Check out the DiVX movies to see it in action. It even works in 3D!"
Heh, I went to high school in Winnipeg with that guy. (Well, he was in grade 9 when I was in grade 12.) He was a math prodigy back then. Placed highly in all the Canadian math competitions while he was underaged by a few years.
Nice concept, but I wouldn't want to use it in a bus or such. It real life it would crave some sort of gyro to detect movement. Imagine a bus rounding a corner and the text compensating by scrolling. At least it would serve as amusement to the fellow busriders.
Of course there are other solutions, and there is defenently a need for a solution to this problem. I would suggest having touch sensitive sides of the actual PDA. To scroll, simply stroke the side of the PDA (not a wheel, but the side). But there are probably even better solutions to this. I enjoy the peephole approach, but must regrettably say that the problem is to control it (without clicking tiny sliders).
Anyways, I think it would be neat to have a PDA where the little box part was just the computer (well, the screen part could also be used), and the visual interface used those 3-D glasses. Dragging the pointer around would show a mouse on the glasses. Make the interface bluetooth or 802.11 and that would be extra cool!
I seem to remember seeing something like this in a gadget-oriented genre, like a Bond film, for maps. It's a pretty cool idea, since it's not much different than using a magnifying lens.
In fact, when you think about it, this is a real-world application of a virtual device that implements a real-world tool. Check out The Movable Filter as a User Interface Tool : essentially a magnifying lens with "logical filters". Now that's been moved back into the real world again.
Who needs new ideas when there are so many good ones that haven't been used already?
I remember hearing about something with a hand held device that was gyroscope enabled that allowed you to do something similar (and this was about 2 years ago I think). If you tilt the device to the left, it scrolled to the left and so on. I don't have the URL handy, but it doesn't seem to me like this is that new of a concept.. unless I'm missing something (unfortunately the site is too slashdotted to read right now)
it's the same problem that 3D game developers have with the 'camera'. and on tiny handheld screens, this problem would be even worse.
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
For those who couldn't face downloading the oodles of movies, this is the best scene:
Toward the end of the movie, he's demo-ing the prototype, standing in front of a bulletin board, and copying a *big* map onto the *small* screen of his Sony Clio. Quite impressive. But I did feel like going "Psssst. Use the built-in cam."
yes, we have no bananas
Why is this different from the "rock 'n scroll" approach used in the itsy?
Haha! Public domain? Hardly!
The stuff that was implemented in X Windows was based on an idea from a Berkeley Systems product for the Mac that was available in the late 1980s. Ask Tom LaStrange.
You aren't that far off. I remember a location based services talk given a couple years back. One possibility that was proposed with the availability of 3G+ wireless networks consisted of a wireless handheld with GPS displaying underground pipes/service lines in just the method you describe (kind of a wireless "First Call" service). A lot more useful than your example, but the same idea.