Observant Computers

While thoroughly enjoying a bowl of excellent Dal Takhni, Keith Lang—interaction designer for the excellent Mac utility Skitch—explained why he thinks, "computers are pretty dumb." He told us that he would like computers to be built with an awareness of the human using them:

• to be able to sense when a hand is resting on the mouse
• to fire an event when hands are on, or hovering above, the keyboard
• to know when the user is looking at the screen.

The next day, I could see that Keith was pretty impressed when trialing the Tobii eye-tracker. Tobii is a device that records where human eyes are looking on the screen. Today, it's used for eye-tracking studies and as an alternative control system for motor-impaired individuals—rest your gaze on the button for 2 seconds to make the button click; read a block of text to make the text automatically scroll…

Observant Computers—they're inevitable. And when they are, smart software developers like Keith will take full advantage.

I'm looking forward leveraging new interaction patterns that become possible as a result of the introduction of Observant Computers.

Comments

[Keith Lang]

Thanks Loryn for the note. Just to be clear, there's a team of people who work on Skitch, and I'm not a coder myself (I work on UI + UX)!

I like your term 'Observant Computers' — I think computers could benefit from some lower level 'awareness'. When I say this, people will jump to some utopian future thinking about a computer that has some machine vision etc etc. However, I suspect there's a lot of value that could be gleaned by knowing things like…

- Is the mouse currently being held?
- Are someones hands hovering over/ resting on the keyboard?
- Are the modifier keys being touched (but not depressed)
- Is there something (someone) sitting less than 2 meters in front of the monitor?

The iPhones 'held-to-ear' IR detector is an example of what I suspect is pretty simple and cheap technology.

[Loryn Jenkins]

Thanks for clarifying your role, Keith. I've changed my description of you in the article from "author" to "interaction designer".

[Miko]

Computers are like little babies, they only do what we tell them to do, and from now and then they became moody and wont do what you command.

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