Hi Gary --

At 2:48 PM +0100 8/21/03, Gary McGovern wrote:
>I'd like to question the usability of a single screen dynabook and similar
>devices.

It's really a matter of number of pixels in front of your visual 
field (you've only got flat retinas so you only have a single screen 
yourself). My wife has the Mac Cinema display and this gives her 
quite enough pixels to do what you suggest should done with paper 
plus computer screen. Nicholas Negroponte in the 70s showed how the 
page flipping that people are used to can be nicely simulated, etc. 
One of the several physical designs for the Dynabook from the past 
was a lightweight HMD with "variable acuity display" along the lines 
of McDonnel-Douglas' research (this HM display tracks your eyes and 
puts 1M+pixels mostly into your fovea where most of your high quality 
vision is done). This provides a virtual and seamless subjective 
image.

BTW, Bill Atkinson's theory of the Dynabook was that it should be 
just a virtual notebook of stacked virtual sheets that you could flip 
and search and draw on in various ways. His first pass at a real 
system along these lines was called Hypercard -- and I think this is 
still a very good model.

So there are many ways of doing this. I don't think there is much 
ultimate utility in staying with paper (BTW, I still do what you do 
with a paper notebook, but view this as temporary until the human 
factors can be done well enough), and I think there is a lot of 
utility in trying to make "dynamic paper" (on one display or many) 
really work.

Cheers,

Alan

>
>My personal preference would be a device that I don't think exists yet. At
>home when I do rough drafts and designs etc, I find it awkward to work with
>one screen.
>
>Instead I use a spiral A4 paper pad of 150 pages and ink pen and figure
>things out before I go to the computer. I like to leaf through pages and go
>back and forth and so on.
>
>HPs research into reusable paper gave me the idea that a computerised
>version couldn't be that far away. A computerised pen based version with
>its own OS that could make the 150 hard pages into into infinite pages.
>
>As I'm a user and they are my requirements, I couldn't be wrong could I ?
>
>Somebody please give me more info about this!
>
>Thanks!
>Gary


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