Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu!bradb
From: bradb@ai.toronto.edu (Brad Brown)
Subject: Re: Human Factors: Paper-Like Interface
Message-ID: <88Dec10.134912est.10521@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
References: <2690003@hpdsla.HP.COM>
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 88 13:49:07 EST


RE IBM's announcement of a "paper-like" interface:

I don't know very much about it, but the latest issue of ComputerWorld
(a trade rag) that crossed my desk carried a blerb about a new product
from Wang Information Systems that has an LCD pad that you write on
with a stylus.  It was not clear what kind of software it ran or
whether it was able to do full general character recognition, but it's
a real product...   A few months ago I heard of a similar product from
another company, can't remember who, that tried to acomplish the same
thing.  Both systems seem to be very expensive and it's not clear to
me that the technology is there to make them work really well.

Q:  How many people would really want an interface like this?  I would
love to draw on paper for things like drawings and equations, and it
would probably be very nice for menu selections if the menus would 
change as you touched them.  I don't really think, however, that a 
stylus would be better for text input -- in my case, I type *much*
faster than I write and my writing is not very good.  My typing is
so much better than my writing that I prefer to compose text directly
into a word processor, where one of the advantages is that I can look
at my notes or a paper while I type, letting the word processor deal
with word wrap and stuff...

					(-:  Brad Brown  :-)
					bradb@ai.toronto.edu