People, Pens, Paper, and Computers
(A post from November 2008 that had been marked private for some reason.)
Attended a talk today that was part of the HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) Seminar Series at MIT CSAIL. Some very exciting stuff.
For several decades now (say, since the Xerox Star was introduced in 1981) there have been dreams and hype of the “paperless office”. This dream has not been realised, because paper has many great qualities that suggest that it is not going to go anywhere. In many ways, technologies that have been touted to replace paper have proved rather cumbersome. Somewhat like writing like this:
Some recent technologies that keep the dream alive are the Tablet PC and (new to me) the Anoto (etc.) digital pens that work in conjunction with digital paper (just normal paper printed with a pattern, not “electronic paper”). I played for a few seconds with Livescribe‘s “Pulse Smartpen”, but it was after the talk so I didn’t have much time. Here is a video of all that it can do.
People prefer paper. There have been two lines of work — trying to produce paper-like technology and trying to improve integration between paper and the PC.
I guess both the tablet PC and Livescribe-like technologies fall into the former category. For the Tablet PC, he described a model of interaction that (with a pen) is more natural than the point-and-click model: crossing. The idea is that instead of actions being performed when a target on the screen is clicked upon, actions are performed when targets are crossed across. It is claimed that crossing-based interface is at least as fast as point-and-click, and is faster when you require only “approximate” crossing, and it is possible to change all your applications to work with crossing instead by simply changing a system DLL. He showed a crossing-based drawing application called CrossY; see the video.
Then he showed another work called PapierCraft, which fits into the other line of work. The insight is that although people prefer to read and annotate on paper, they usually get them in digital form. The common example is that academics download an article, then print it out, and work with the printed copy, making annotations etc. The idea is to keep in a database an image of what the printed copy looks like, and then consider people to be working on the digital copy with the printed copy as a proxy for it — when they perform annotations, cut-copy-paste etc., link those operations to the digital copy. See video.
He also showed some two-display e-book readers that can emulate flipping pages, working with different documents, etc; see video.
The speaker was François Guimbretière; see his page for more details. All very cool stuff.