Hi Jecel --

At 8:22 PM -0300 8/23/03, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
>On Saturday 23 August 2003 16:00, Alan Kay wrote:
>>  [....]
>>  There were two other basic forms for the Dynabook (which, after all,
>>  is 95% a SW UI concept). One was that we thought there was a better
>>  earlier chance for a display on a chip that could be introduced into
>>  ordinary glasses to make a completely inobtrusive HMD.
>
>I would add user user's viewpoint camera to that, so the computer could
>see more or less the same thing as the user. This would allow very
>crude head tracking - at the very least you could keep virtual objects
>aligned with real ones. The computer could see the user's hand so that
>"touching" the virtual objects would activate/drag/whatever them (there
>was an old Amiga demo of this, but from a fixed viewpoint). A simple
>gesture could store anything that the camera was seeing for future
>reference - a face, the page of a magazine, etc.

This idea was in the notorious "Pendry Papers" that a bunch of us 
wrote at PARC in 1971, and then used in the "The Knowledge Navigator" 
"visionary video" that we did at Apple long ago. Dick Bolt (a 
terrific UI designer who worked for Nicholas in the heyday of ArchMac 
came up with many wonderful ways to use such a camera.

>
>>  5. This is a matter of pixels and acuity. The (in Japan) Sharp Zaurus
>>  with a full 640*480 screen at around 200 pitch is a lot more usable
>>  than the 1/4 VGA displays common over here. But absolute size does
>>  count for all ages. My favorite paper medium (until we can do a real
>>  Dynabook) is the Strathmore Sketch Book, which folds to 5.5" * 8.5"
>>  and opens to provide a writing and drawing surface that is 11" * 8.5"
>>  (in landscape) and for which my measurements and scans of the stuff I
>>  put in there would be adequately handled with about 1M pixels (that
>>  calculation again) and antialiasing. We could make one of these today
>>  with two of the smaller 8" diagonal SVGA displays that are now
>>  available pretty inexpensively. It would have a bit of a line/gap
>>  running down the center, but so does my paper sketchbook.
>
>How about having these screens with half of a "keyboard in a drawer"
>under (or inside, I should say) each one? That kind of keyboard was an
>idea you once gave me and which is currently used in several Zaurus
>models (http://www.keysan.com/big/picoshr1587.html).

Yep, this is an old one that is still kicking around. That was the 
scheme I used in one of the double screen Dynabook designs. I still 
think this collection of features is a pretty nice alternative design 
center to the classical 1968 Dynabook design. There are many good 
drawer schemes around (Ike Nassi did a good one in a penbased system 
he did in a startup for an unnamed larger company).

>
>When closed or opened 360 degrees (to be used as a small tablet) it
>would be just the size of the 8" screen, but thick. Opened 180 degrees
>it would be half as thick and twice as wide - a nice large tablet.
>Finally, pulling out the full sized keyboard would make it taller.

Yep, again.

Cheers,

Alan

>
>Example dimensions:
>
>  1) 20 x 14 x 3cm (7.9 x 5.5 x 1.2")
>  2) 20 x 28 x 1.5cm (7.9 x 11 x 0.6")
>  3) 28 x 28 x 1.5cm (11 x 11 x 0.6")
>
>-- Jecel


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