I'm reading Stewart Brand's The Media Lab, a great antidote to lots of current futurology numbers. I didn't make it through Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near mostly because it seemed so breathless and made me feel as if I had no control of my life. Reading the nearly twenty year old The Media Lab makes me think that technologists' prose always has a certain breathless quality and in the end what seemed like a revolution at the time is merely an accretion.
I'm currently reading the "Eyes as Output" chapter, which mostly covers the work of Richard Bolt, who has been doing work with human interfaces. Brand describes his work in using eyetracking as a form of feedback:
Bolt turned to his desktop PC to show a demo he was working on. The screen filled with: a living room wall in color, a fireplace with brass andirons, a mantel with brass candlesticks and a ships model, and two pictures on the wall. Two programs would function with this display, Bolt said, "looker" and "show-er." "Looker" is the trace of the viewer's point-of-regard as it dashes around examining different parts of the screen's image. "Show-er" will be the computer's verbal response to what "looker" is doing, explaining "it's a Monet" if the viewer concentrates on the left picture, continuing with further explanation, perhaps, if the viewer lingers on the picture, moving on to other topics if the viewer keeps looking around.
Reading that passage and other information on Bolt makes me think of two lazyweb requests.
Lazy Web Request #1
A mathematical formula for adapting tag clouds with user interests. Meaning the user has a tag cloud of his own and if he has a big interest in cantaloupe and a small interest in broccoli, the tag cloud he's viewing will grow the cantaloupe tag and shrink the broccoli tag. This one's probably out there already.
Lazy Web Request #2
A cheap eyetracker and "show-er" software to view flickr badges. Imagine sifting through 100s of images to find particular images and get information on what you want to learn.
Here's another link from Poynter Online I found on eyetracking.
Abrupt, senseless ending followed by tags.
Technorati Tags: eyetracker, MediaLab, interface, lazyweb
Posted by mastr at July 28, 2006 01:21 PM