Are There Better Ways to Enhance the Person-to-Digital Computer Interface?
If you and I were smart enough to answer this question, then we are wasting our time at our present occupation . Today the concept of the mouse has been implemented in just about every imaginable fashion ” we have roller mice, laser mice, roller ball mice, and even baseball hats fitted with acceleration sensors that cause the cursor to move up, down, left, or right based on the movements of the wearer of the baseball cap. The rationale for the baseball cap is that the user does not have to lift his hands from the keyboard to move the cursor.
Don t count out the touch screen advocates. There are truck stops in Nevada where a truck driver can touch a large map of the state of Nevada and the area he touches is expanded greatly in scale until the screen gets down to a 2.5-mile picture of the road conditions under one s thumb. A red road is ice; a blue road is nice. Or there are suitcases that the maintenance people on a nuclear submarine carry around inside the boat. By continuing to point on the screen of the video terminal inside the suitcase the scale expands to show more and more detail of the hardware embedded in the hull. Finally the screen presents a tiny portion of the boat, and when the mechanic points to a particular subassembly that needs repair he is informed if that part is located onboard. If not onboard, it is ordered for pickup the next time the submarine surfaces. Before the suitcase came along, the mechanics carried 1,800 pounds of user s and maintenance manuals somewhere in a forgotten corner of the submarine. The suitcase and all its data modules probably weigh a hundred pounds . This means that the seamen aboard the boat can now store 1,700 pounds of DVDs to help pass time under the seas.
I challenge you to discover the next generation of input devices to digital computers.
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