Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!gatech!ncsuvx!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!jack
From: jack@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Voice Interface
Message-ID: <2179@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Date: 30 Dec 88 17:43:42 GMT
References: <7015@ems.Ems.MN.ORG>
Reply-To: jack@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie, Unthank
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One idea I have long been curious about in this area: has anyone tried to do
an acoustic "window" manager?  Spatial location can be faked by shifting the
phase of the output between the left and right ears; differently pitched
voices could be used to provide a second dimension, so mouse or trackball
movements would map onto a "screen" with maybe twenty "windows", like:

		soprano	soprano	soprano	soprano	soprano
FAR								FAR
		alto	alto	alto	alto	alto
LEFT								RIGHT
		tenor	tenor	tenor	tenor	tenor

		bass	bass	bass	bass	bass

Perhaps reinforce the phase separation by using synthesizers with different
accents, too?  It's not obvious what the best way to indicate focus is in this
scheme - maybe by adding a tone when not focused on any one window, which
would stop when you clicked to select the window you wanted?  Such a tone
could encode spatial information itself - cavernous echoes when in big
directories?  "cd /flute/bagpipes/breaking_glass"?

Comments from any blind programmers out there?  How much can we reasonably ask
trained human ears to do?

-- 
ARPA: jack%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk          USENET: jack@glasgow.uucp
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Mail: Jack Campin, Computing Science Dept., Glasgow Univ., 17 Lilybank Gardens,
      Glasgow G12 8QQ, SCOTLAND     work 041 339 8855 x 6045; home 041 556 1878