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From: lance@motcsd.csd.mot.com (lance.norskog)
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
Subject: Re: Track ball on a keyboard? vs Eye Trackers
Message-ID: <4244@motcsd.csd.mot.com>
Date: 14 Jun 91 18:04:52 GMT
Organization: Motorola CSD, Cupertino CA
Lines: 44


jclose@potomac.ads.com (Jeff Close) writes:

>In article <1991Jun12.155623.15673@wpi.WPI.EDU> dmorin@wpi.WPI.EDU (Duane D Mor
in) writes:
>>
>>Take the idea of having your hands never leave the home row one step further,
>> and equip people with a simple headset that they can don while at the
>> terminal.  Just look at the screen and move the cursor wherever you want it
>> to go.  Unfortunately, this is in direct violation of rule (1) that I just
>> listed.  How do you know when to turn it on or off?  A hot key sequence?
>> That defeats the purpose, somewhat.  It could be argued that a "keyboardist"
>> as opposed to a "typist" can manipulate the function keys just as rapidly
>> as a traditional typewriter, and therefore could hit F10 or something without
>> much problem.  The technology to do this certainly isn't unrealistic - if
>> Nintendo can mass produce such a monster, anyone can.

>There were several examples of work with such a device at CHI this year.  One
>company, LC Technologies, in Fairfax, VA, makes a relatively (!) cheap
>version, and Bob Jacobs at Naval Research Lab gave a presentation on their
>research in developing applications using them.  What they've discovered is
>that there are certain input "tokens" that really don't lend themselves to
>this technique, because of the timing required or the ambiguity involved.
>However, they have had success in some cases with tracking the eye movements
>and interpreting an appropriately long delay as a desire to shift focus.


The Nintendo ZapGun is a light pen with a very tight lens in the barrel.
Konami makes a helmet with the light pen lens in a monocle.  The helmet
also has stereo headphones.  $40 in the toy stores.  It also has a
voice button: make any noise into a microphone and the switch closes.

One of my background projects is to hook this sucker up to the PC.
Cirrus VGA chips have light pen support, but Cirrus is no help in
finding a card vendor which supports the light pen connector; so
I'm stuck with Hercules resolution (720x340 b/w).  Ataris also have
light pen connectors.

Obviously, you're not going to draw with this thing, but it should
be good for doing menu button selections.  If I go in for wrist
surgery, I'll probably build the damn thing in a hurry, along with
my chord keyboard project.

Lance Norskog