in this rather long sort of marathon presentation i've tried to break it up into three parts the first being
a whole lot of examples on how it can be a little bit more pleasurable to deal with a computer and really address the qualities of the human interface
these will be some simple design qualities and they will also be some qualities of if you will the intelligence of interaction then the second part will really just be examples of new technologies new
media falling very much into that mold again i will go through them as fast as possible and then the last one will be some examples i've been able to collect which i think
this belief and i share most of it that we will be using the
tv screens or their equivalents for electronic books of the future but then you think my god what a terrible image you get when you look at still pictures on tv
doesn't have to be terrible and that again is a slide taken from a tv set and it was pre processed to be very sympathetic to the tv medium and it absolutely looks beautiful well what's
personal computers and video text teletext systems are somewhat horrified by what you see on the screen
you have to remember that tv was designed to be looked at eight times the distance of the diagonal so you get thirteen inch nineteen inch whatever
tv and then you should multiply that by eight and that's the distance you should sit away from the tv set now all of a sudden we've put people eighteen inches
in front of a tv and all the artifacts that none of the original designers expected to be seen
all of a sudden are staring you in the face the shadow mask the scan lines all of that and they can be treated very easily there are actually ways of getting rid of them there are actually ways of
i'm talking here a little bit about display technologies let me talk about how you might input information and my favorite example is always fingers
i'm very interested in touch sensitive displays high tech high touch isn't that what some of you say it's certainly a very important medium for
and a lot of people think that fingers are a very low resolution sort of stylus for inputting to a display
in fact they're not it's really a very very high resolution input medium you have to just do it twice you have to touch the screen and then rotate your finger slightly and you can move a cursor
with great accuracy and so when you see on the market these systems that have just a few light emitting diodes on the side and are very low resolution
it's nice that they exist because it still is better than nothing but it in some sense misses the point namely that fingers are a very very high resolution
input medium what are some of the other advantages well the one advantage is that you don't have to pick them up
and people don't realize how important that is not having to pick up your fingers to use them
when you think for a second of the mouse on macintosh and i will not criticize the mouse
too much when you're typing what you have and you want to now put something first of all you've got to find the mouse you have to
probably stop maybe not come to a grinding halt but you've got to find that mouse then you find the mouse and you're going to have to wiggle it a little bit
to see where the cursor is on the screen and then when you finally see where it is then you've got to move it to get the cursor over there and then bang you've got to hit a button and do whatever
that's four separate steps versus typing and then touching and typing and just doing it all in one motion or one and a half depending on how you want to count
again what i'm trying to do is just illustrate the kinds of problems that i think face the designers of new computer systems and entertainment systems and educational systems
from the perspective of the quality of that interface and another advantage of course of using fingers is you have ten of them and
we have never known how to do this technically so this slide is a fake slide we never succeeded in using ten fingers but there are certain things you can do obviously with more than one finger input
which is rather fascinating what we did stumble across was something again which is typical of the computer field is when you have a
bug that you can't get rid of you turn it into a feature and maybe
maybe a mouse is a new kind of bug but the bug in our case was in touch sensitive displays
we wanted to be able to draw you know rub your finger across the screen to input continuous points and there was just too much friction
actually was a feature in the sense you could build a pressuresensitive display and when you touch it with your finger you can actually then introduce all the forces on the face of that screen
and that actually has a certain amount of value let me see if i can load another disc and show you quickly an example
imagine a screen which is not only touch sensitive now it's pressuresensitive and it's pressuresensitive to the forces both in the plane of the screen x y and z at least in one direction we couldn't figure out how to come in the other direction
but let me get rid of the slide and let 's see if this comes on
there is the pressuresensitive display in operation the person 's just if you will pushing on the screen but this is the interesting part
i
stop it for a second because the movie is very badly made and the particular display was built about six years ago and when we moved from one room to another room a rather large person
sat on it and it got destroyed so all we have is this record but imagine that screen having lots of objects on
and the person has touched an object one of n like he did there and then pushed on it
now imagine a program where some of those objects are physically heavy and some are light one is
on a fuzzy rug and the other one is a ping pong ball on a sheet of glass and when you touch it
you have to really push very hard to move that anvil across the screen and yet you touch the ping pong ball very lightly and it just scoots across the screen
and what you can do oops i didn't mean to do that what you can do is actually feed back to the user
move an aircraft carrier versus a little boat in fact they funded it for that very reason the
one that at the interface there are physical
so it's not simply looking at the quality or if you will the luxury of that interface but it's actually looking at the idea of presenting things that previously couldn't be presented before
i want to move onto another example which is one of a different sort where we're trying to use computer and video disc technology now to come up with a new kind of book
the idea is that you're going to take this book if you will and it's going to come alive you're going to breathe life into it
so used to doing monologues film makers for example are the experts in monologue making
you make a film and it has a well formed beginning middle and end and in some sense the art of it is that and you then say well you know
it sort of nibbles at the core of the whole profession and all the assumptions of that medium so book writing is the same thing
show you very quickly is a new kind of book where all sorts of things live in there
but you have to keep a few things in mind one is that this book knows about itself
ok each frame of the movie has information about itself so it knows
at least there is computer readable information in the medium itself it's just not a static movie frame that's one
the other is that you have to realize that it is a randomaccessmedium and you can in fact branch and expand and elaborate and shrink and
here again my favorite example is the cookbook the larousse gastronomique and i think i use the example all too often but it's a great one because
there is a classicending in that little encyclopedia style cookbook that tells you how to do something like penguin and you get to the end of the recipe and it says cook until done
now that would be if you will the top green track which doesn't mean too much but you might have to elaborate for me or for somebody who isn't an expert and say cook at three hundred and eighty degrees for forty five minutes and then for a real beginner
you would go down even further and elaborate more say open the oven preheat wait for the light to go out open the door don't leave it open too long put the penguin in and shut the door whatever and that's a much more elaborate one than you dribble back
that's one kind of use of randomaccess and the other is where you
want to explain the same thing in different ways if you're in a classroom situation and somebody asks a question
the last thing you do is repeat what you just said you try and think of a different way of saying the same thing or if you know the particular student
and that student 's cognitive style then you might say it in a way that you think would have a good impedance match with that student there are all sorts of techniques you will use and again this is a
different kind of branching so what i will show you is a rather boring book but i'm afraid sometimes you have to do boring books
because the sponsors aren't necessarily interested in fiction and entertainment and this is a book on how to
repair a transmission now i don't even know what vintage the transmission is but let me just show you very quickly some of it
and we'll move on now this is his table of contents ok just a picture of the transmission and as you rub your finger across the transmission it highlights the various parts
when i find a chapter that i want to see i just touch the text
and the system will format pages for me to read
the words or phrases that are lit up in red
so i can get a different definition by just touching the word and the definition appears superimposed over the illustration
this is relatively important because it sets the this
page with glossary words highlighted in red
i can get a definition of these words just by touching them and the definition will appear in the illustration corner
i can get back to the illustration but in this case it's not a single frame
the two headed slider is a speed control that allows me to watch the movie
at various speeds in forward or reverse
heard of sound sync movies this is text sync movies so as the movie plays the text gets highlighted we highlight the
as we go through the
i suspect that some of you might not even understand that language
i'm at the third and last part of this which i said i would make an attempt to at least give you some examples that may be more directly related to the world of entertainment and of course
good education has got to be good entertainment so my first example will be drawn from
very recent experiment that we've been doing in this case in senegal where we have tried to use
this as an instrument where there is a complete reversal of roles the child is if you will the teacher and the machine is the student
and the art of computer programming is a vehicle that approximates thinking about thinking but teaching kids programming per se is utterly irrelevant and
just a few slides i want to go through but there's a story i'd like to tell
and that was when before we did this in any developing countries we're doing it in fact in three developing countries right now pakistan columbia and senegal we did it in some pretty rough areas of new york city and one child
whose name i've forgotten he was about seven or eight years old absolutely considered mentally handicapped couldn't read didn't even make it in the lower section of the
classes and was pretty much not in school though physically there but did hang around the quote computer room where there were quite a few computers and learned this particular language called logo
and learned it with great ease and found it a lot of fun it was very interesting and one day by chance some visitors from the
came by in their double breasted suits looking at this setup and none of the children who were normally there except for this one child
there he was and he said let me show you how this works and they got an absolutelyingenious wonderful description of logo and the child was just zipping right through it showing them all sorts of things
it was time to go see the principal whom they'd actually come to see not the computer room they went upstairs and they said you know this is absolutelyremarkable that child you know was very articulate and showed us and you know even dealt with the things he couldn't
do automatically with that manual it was just absolutelyfantastic the principal said you know there's a dreadful mistake because that child can't read
and you obviously have been hoodwinked or you've talked about somebody else and they all got up and they all went downstairs and the child was still there
and they did something very intelligent they asked the child can you read
and it really meant something to the child the child read beautifully it turned out and was really very competent so it actually meant something and
that story has many other anecdotes that are similar but wow the key to the future of computers in education
is right there and it's when does it mean something to a child there is a
and it's not but we think speech my god little children pick it up somehow and by the age of two they're doing a mediocre job and by three and four they're speakingreasonably well
is that speaking has great value to a child the child can get a great deal by talking to you
reading and writing is utterly useless there is no reason for a child to read and write except blind faith and that it's going to help
what happens is is you go to school and people say you know just believe me you know you're going to like it and you're going to like reading and just read and read on the other hand you give a kid
a three year old kid a computer and they type a little command and poof something happens and all of a sudden you may not call that reading and writing but a certain bit of typing and reading stuff on the screen has a huge payoff
and it's a lot of fun and in fact it's a powerful educationalinstrument well in senegal we found
that this was the traditional classroom one hundred and twenty kids three per desk one teacher a little bit of chalk this student was one of our first students
and it's the girl on the left leaning with her chalkboard and she came within two days i want to show you the program she wrote
and remember her hairstyle ok and that is the program she made that's what meant something to her is doing the hair pattern and actually did it
within two days an hour each day and found it was to her absolutely the most meaningful piece but rooted in that
little did she know how much knowledge she was acquiring about geometry and just math and logic and all the rest and again i could talk for three hours about this subject
i will come to my last example and
my last example as some of my former colleagues whom i see in the room
can imagine what it will be yes it is it's our work it was a while ago and it still is my favorite project
of teleconferencing and the reason it remains a favorite project is that we were asked to do
a teleconferencing system where you had the following situation you had five people at five different sites they were known people and
you had to have these people in teleconference such that each one was utterly convinced that the other four were physically present
now
that is sufficiently you know zany that we would obviously jump to the bait and we did and the fact that we knew the people
we had to take a page out of the history of walt disney we actually went so far as to build crts in the shapes of the people 's faces
so if i wanted to call my friend peter sprague on the phone my secretary would get his head out and bring it and set it on
no way i can explain to you the amount of eye contact you get with that physical face projected on a three d crt of that sort
the next thing that we had to do is to persuade them that there needed to be spatial correspondence which is straightforward
but again it's something that didn't fall naturally out of a telecommunications or computing style of thinking it was a very if you will architectural or spatial
if you will that person and you point frequently to the empty seat and you say he or she wouldn't agree and the empty chair is that person and the
crucial so we said well these will be on round tables and the order around the table had to be the same so that at my site i would be if you will real and then at each other 's site you'd have
plastic heads and the plastic heads sometimes you want to project them and there are a number of schemes which i don't want to dwell on but this is the one that we finally
used where we projected onto rear screen material that was molded in the face literally in the face of the person and i'll show you one more slide where this is actually made from something called a solid photograph
and is the screen now we track on the person 's head the head motions so we transmit with a video the head positions and so this head moves
in about two axes so if i all of a sudden turn to the person to my left
and start talking to that person then at the person to my right 's site he'll see these two plastic heads talking to each other and then
if that person interrupts then those two heads may turn and it really is reconstructing quite accurately teleconferencing
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