I have just realised what the next useful enhancement to a word processor would be. I want somethng that tracks my eye movement on screen, and a key combination which will jump the cursor to where I am looking. That’s got to be possible, hasn’t it, Rupert? Probably easier to do than voice recognition.
The point is that finding the place that the cursor needs to be to separate two gummed up words, or to change a mishit comma into a full-stop, is something that my eye can do at once but it doesn’t fit at all easily into the ways that cursors normally move, by sentence or by word. It’s no use jumping to a delimiter which exists only in my eye.
Of course, it might be quicker to learn to type more reliably …
Dasher: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/SpecialNeeds.html
Verily, as the man from The Swintons said. Lots of info about eyetrackers on the Web, probably enough to make your own if you wanted. The ‘jump to where I’m looking’ bit would be trivial, assuming the things can resolve down to the space between letters.
Which may not be possible, not without some sort of hardwired bus going into the visual cortex to identify which bit at the centre of the visual field you’re actually fixated on. I don’t know how much of a word is worked out in parallel by a fixed stare, and how much depends on physically moving the eye along the line.
If you want, I’ll pop round with the bone drill, soldering iron and teflon-coated IDE cable. But you’ll have to promise to stay very, very still. Even if it tickles. Which it might.
R ‘No, I’m not going to let Kevin Warwick put my coil in’ G
Thanks. You’re too kind. Really, I couldn’t. No, really … But I think the problem couldn’t be solved because odf the difficulty of resolution. The stuff I looked at from the page that Jonathan linked to had a resolutio of about 0.25″, which is fine for detecting buttons and simple menu entries, but won’t separate letters in 12 point text.