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A GUI For Books
NASA's Goddard Flight Center has just issued a contract to use Touch User Interface technology from a company called Somatic Digital. Their "TouchBooks" let printed material connect to digital devices via sensors in the covers. (C'mon, don't tell me you've never pressed on a URL on a printed page and expected something to happen.) This page on the vendor's site has videos of a 7-year-old using a TouchBook. Works with XP and OS X.
This page on the vendor's site has videos of a 7-year-old using a TouchBook.
OK, but little kids pick up on things pretty well. Like grandma asking little Timmy to open her child-proof medecine bottle for her.
Show me a video of my grandma using this thing and I'll be impressed.
I can tell you I've never tried "pressing" a URL on anywhere other than an electronic screen (not even physical hyperlinks (Semacodes).
What I miss more in hard copies of books though, is an easy search/grep functionality. Yeah, Indexes and Table of Contents try to achieve this to a certain extent, but that's nothing compared to the search capability in Electronic documents.
On countless occasions, after a long day of poring over text in vi, and searching for text as easily as "/[search-pattern]", I miss the same capability when I sit down to read a printed book.
And no, I don't want to go to http://books.google.com/ when I want to find the last page I read that I read a Character's name on in my mystery novel.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I think you're a little out of touch with modern kids. My son would was perfectly comfortable using a mouse, keyboard, and joystick to launch and play his favorite games. At 3. My wife does simple spreadsheets with her grade 1 class.
Isn't this pretty much the same thing as the Leapfrog products? Leapfrog uses a magnetic stylist to monitor where the child is pressing on the page but this is certainly nothing new. And definitely nothing exciting or well done.
The technology will be there soon. For instance, 600dpi ePaper with optional (but not necessary) backlighting. A display that looks as good as the output of a decent laser printer will be around in the next decade or so. The capacity to store any amount of reading material you would ever want on a device the size of a pocket paperback is there now.
The reason it will never take off is because for the same price as a paperback + $1.99, you will get a single eBook that's encrusted with DRM, can't be transferred to a different device and, if the capriciousness of content providers continues on the path it is now, will expire (and self-delete) in a month.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.