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Science Technology

Type With Your Eyes 199

Posted by timothy from the type-from-a-full-suspension dept.
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."
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Type With Your Eyes More

Type With Your Eyes

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  • 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...

    • Re:Bad for relationships (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You really do have to be careful with these non exact input mechanisms.

      My last mobile phone had voice dialing on it, you simply say the name of the person you want to call.

      It was fine whilst I was only seeing Karen.

      It was when I started two-timing her with Sharon that the trouble started...

  • http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/26/068231 &mode=nested&tid=100

    • Re:Didn't /. already cover this? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, they did, and I had it installed for a while.

      Not to actually use mind you; its absolute shit. If you use it to enter more than three workds you'll be cross eyed and ready to hurl your mouse across the room. No no, start Dasher up, and then leave it running while you get on with your work. Hilarity ensues! (Note: Hilarity may not ensue)
    • Yeah, but it wasn't GPL by then, IIRC.

    • Re:Didn't /. already cover this? (Score:5, Funny)

      by hymie3 ( 187934 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @06:59AM (#4125526)
      Didn't /. already cover this?
      Yes, but Timothy wouldn't be the Timothy /. knows and loves if he didn't repost articles that were less than 90 days old.
      We love you Timothy! Keep posting old crap!
      We love feeling intellectually superior to someone who gets paid to surf all day.
      Smooches!
    • if ( $news_queue eq "" && ($current_time - $last_posted_article) > 7200) {
      &get_any_old_article("Timothy");
      &post_it;
      }
  • 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!

    • Your last few completions are always still visible on the left as new choices are provided on the right. THis allows you to go back and change letters or words, or even the whole paragraph you were entering.

  • Also at Nature.com (Score:3, Informative)

    by Elledan ( 582730 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @06:08AM (#4125411) Homepage
    Nature Science Update: Eyes write [nature.com]
  • This app was posted a month or two ago. It's pretty cool, though, I have the handheld version installed on my iPaq.

  • crossed eyes (Score:2, Funny)

    by myster0n ( 216276 )
    Must look really stupid when you try to enter ctrl-v. And don't even mention ctrl-alt-delete ....
  • On using this for PDA text entry: here [slashdot.org]

  • Yes (Score:1)

    by yatest5 ( 455123 )
    a break for your wrists

    I would much prefer RSI in my eyes than my wrists!

    Incidentally, I assume a friend of /. wrote this, second time in two months it's been posted!
    • Are you sure- Imagine if you couldnt turn your eyes to look- you would always have to move your whole head. Beleive me- the last thing you would ever, ever want is RSI in your eyes... That would seriously fscked.

      On the other hand, I have been messing around with dasher- and I think as you get more familiar with it, and it with your style, it gets faster. What would be nice would be an option to increase the speed as you become more proficient...Its a nice concept and could go far with a little adaptation...

  • where... (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by InsaneCreator ( 209742 )
    ...have I seen this before? O yeah, slashdot - news for nerds, posted at least 3 times in 2 months...

  • Good idea (Score:5, Funny)

    by dnoyeb ( 547705 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @06:11AM (#4125421) Homepage Journal
    Most programmers really don't need the extra wrist exercise anyway.

    I wonder if this will cause your eye muscles to get bigger?
    • No its more like: "Hey boss, I just finished writing this program in record time with this new vision-based text entry system. The floor and walls seem to be moving...." and then you puke on your boss.
  • Yeah, this has been on /. already (slashdot [slashdot.org]) but I think the part with the eye-typing is actually new.

  • A few thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HiQ ( 159108 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @06:12AM (#4125426)
    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.
    • It's a heck of a lot slower than typing. They are quoting 25wpm whereas a reasonable typist can easily make 40wpm, and a good touch-typist anything up to 100 or so. I last tested at 92.

    • Re:A few thoughts (Score:2, Interesting)

      by tezza ( 539307 )
      Hmm, you say it would be a pain for programming.

      Imagine instead a 'phrase' keyboard. for, while, {, your variable names, and object method calls all floating towards you.

      Pick and assemble you algorithm.

      Brilliant. The applications go way beyond simple strings of letters.
    • 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.
    • When this was posted a couple of months ago, it was touted as a new interface for PDAs - and I can see it being useful for that. I played with it for a while (about an hour) and got quite proficient. It also helps to load up a dictionary and the sample woprds file that comes with Dasher (you have to load these files each time you run the program) - sure it's nowhere near as fast as typing on a full sized keyboard, but for making short notes on a pda on a train/bus/plane or in a meeting, it's great!

  • from the article [cnn.com] 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?

  • Nice (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by squaretorus ( 459130 )
    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!!!
    • OK, so it's not as quick as typing, but hey, what if you couldn't type! Now it might just be quicker than typing if typing involved holding a stylus in your mouth and pecking at the keys one by one.

      The words 'Dim' and 'Wit' spring to mind, but are typed, of course, the old fashioned way.

  • So I am just sitting here surfing (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kasmiur ( 464127 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @06:22AM (#4125445)
    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.
  • I can understand when /. editors double up on stories from long ago and other editors (!). But this is not exactly the case here [slashdot.org].

  • This is actually VERY practical... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bsmoor01 ( 150458 ) <seth.beere@org> on Friday August 23, 2002 @06:22AM (#4125450)
    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.
    • Yeah, perhaps we'll soon see Stephen Hawking posting on Slashdot when he's not occupied with figuring out how imaginary time works. :-)

      Hm.. Just remembered that he *can* actually type with his odd wheelchair that's hooked up to all sort of things. I wonder if it runs Linux?

    • The solution (Score:2, Interesting)

      by miraj31415 ( 579016 )
      There already is a system out there, albeit closed-source, that provides a better way to type with your eyes than Dasher. The ERICA [ericainc.com] system allows you to look at a keyboard on the screen, and control the mouse to move and "click" on the letter or word of choice. And I bet that you can get better results with it than with Dasher because it uses a customizable QWERTY layout with buttons for word-completion.

      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 [virginia.edu] that made Stephen Hawking's system!

      • Actually, I think the point of Dasher is that it's supposed to beat out systems like ERICA. The animated, suggested words system combined with boxes / sizes that indicate probability is supposed to make it continuously easy to type the most frequent words, based on what you normally type. This is akin to your keyboard changing it's arrangement so that the most common letters for your current word are always right next to your fingers.


        Now, on a keyboard, that's no good, particularly since you can't look at the keyboard and the screen at the same time. The numbers at the Dasher site seem to indicate that it works pretty well when using your eyes, though.

  • Problems when working in meetings... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @06:36AM (#4125480) Homepage
    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.....
  • ...a break for your wrists...
    Come on ! This is slashdot ! 85% of your readership has no means whatsoever to relieve itself from frequent wrist stress.

  • Great for my wrists, but my EYES! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bildstorm ( 129924 ) <`peter.buchy' `at' `shh.fi'> on Friday August 23, 2002 @06:41AM (#4125492) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • 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.
    • Are their any custom keyboards out there for programmers, such that you don't have to hit shift for common characters like *()#! , or ctrl for cutting and pasting?
    • Having moved back to the US, I notice the flicker on TV all the time. I notice the flicker on monitors, in lights, etc.


      WTF? You notice the 30FPS flicker on your TV, but didn't notice the 25FPS (or whatever the hell it is) on PAL?

      You notice the 60Hz flicker in US florescents, but not the 50Hz flicker wherever you were? (Unless you were somewhere on 60-cycle, in which case you are noticing a difference that doesn't exist . . .)

      You need to donate your eyes and brain to medical science. Not when you die, right now.

      The only complaint that could possibly hold any merit is if your video card/monitor was at 60Hz refresh which looks okay (not great) under 50Hz florescents but like total crap under 60Hz lights.

      -Peter
  • 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)

  • "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
  • 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...
    • And after a few years their eyes bug out like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall when he gets pushed out on to the surface of Mars when the window breaks and the room decompresses.

      Why can't someone come up with a CHEAP way of doing mouse input by tracking the pupil. I'd gobble that up in a second.
  • First, from Dasher's site:
    * David wrote the first prototype in tcl, which was ready on Tue Dec 30 1997. This prototype served both as a demonstration of Dasher as a text-entry device, and as a teaching facility for explaining arithmetic coding.
    So it's not exactly new. A friend of mine was messing around with it around 6 months or so.

    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...

    • The "miners caps" to let disabled people look at letters to type have been around much longer than that. I remember my high school computer teacher mentioning them in 1993 or so.
  • 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...?
    • 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.
  • I thousand itch look ed kind a trippy butter I Betty it wood bee easy to Justin loo in the wrong placed Andy ended up typist the wrong wordsmith.

    (... and all that in just over a minute!)

  • Stephen Hawking (Score:2, Interesting)

    by stixman ( 119688 )

    Did anybody else think immediately about Stephen Hawking upon seeing this? I searched the site, and it says in the history [cam.ac.uk] 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!

    • Keep it quiet. I mentioned Hawking, saying he might have an easier time typing but was reminded of his "wheelchair" (or whatever you should call it) so he might not actually have such a big use for this invention. Was immediately rated as Troll. :~( *sniff* Guess it was from my flawed humorous touch I tried to add. :) Ah well...

      Didn't know he *was* actually involved in this. Interesting

  • I think there's an excellent use for this tech... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by foxtrot ( 14140 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @07:37AM (#4125619)
    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...
    • 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
    • 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 have tried it. It is quite cool (although not very fast --- I got 40cpm after a few minutes, which is about my Chinese typing speed). However, the colors make my eyes ache.

    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!

  • Markov chains (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @07:50AM (#4125654)
    This is exactly how Dasher works, except for one crucial point: we alter the SIZE of the shelf space devoted to each book in proportion to the probability of the corresponding text

    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 [fourteenminutes.com] 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.

  • Wow.. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That must hurt, tapping your eyes on the keyboard to type..
    • Yeah, I guess the same designer came up with that idea, that figured out surfing the web was the easiest way to do it.
  • 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.
    • 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?

  • utterly slow (Score:4, Insightful)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Friday August 23, 2002 @07:56AM (#4125679) Journal
    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'.

    • Re:utterly slow (Score:4, Informative)

      by big_gibbon ( 530793 ) <slashdot@nOSpAm.philevans.com> on Friday August 23, 2002 @08:36AM (#4125824) Homepage

      True - if that was how it worked.

      Being bored and at work I downloaded Dasher to give it a go - and I'm pleasantly surprised. No, I wont be using it as a keyboard replacement any time soon, but for times where a keyboard is inconvenient, impractical, or simply impossible, it looks like it's be a worthy substitute.

      The way it works is pretty cunning - the webpage suggests you use driving as a metaphor, which works very well. Rather than an onscreen keyboard, you "drive" down the route of the text you want to type. Think of it as a tree with 26 (OK, 27 with spaces, more with punctuation) branches at each level - so you would start at H, and then "drive" down the e, l, l, o branches. Aiding you in this is the software, which makes guesses as to what you're about to type and makes those "roads" more prominent and easier to "drive" down.

      I'd really recommend people download this and give it a go. It's actually quite a lot of fun :)

      Phil
  • 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 [drudgereport.com]. 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.
    • It also uses statistical modeling. If you enter the password enough times, it will start to predict that you are entering it.

      Kind of a security hole doncha 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!
    • Think of this as a big investment.. You have to get the program to let you type with your eyes, and once they start to go bad from moving them around and you get eyestrain and all that, you then have to invest in contacts/glasses/eye surgery or whatever you want. Yeah, lets mess up our eyes to give our wrists a rest!
  • Dude, this would be REALLY trippy if you're high.

    Alright, pass me a joint. I'll be happy to beta test this ;)
  • 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.
  • As others have no doubt pointed out by now, this has some serious handicaps compared to traditional typing because you have 10 fingers and only two eyes (and the eyes have been trained from birth to act in concert).

    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!
  • Using your eyes to control something that moves, is logical. Using your eyes to control fast keystroke input is almost ridiculous unless you have no other means of control. I should think that being able to point my cusor just by glancing about is a great idea; blinking could control button clicks with possible left eye/right eye combinations.

    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.

  • 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)

  • Optimise for coding (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AlecC ( 512609 )
    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).
  • 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.
    • 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.
  • 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 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

  • 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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