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