Sam Varghese
Thursday, 07 February 2008 20:37
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 5
Which university was this?
The University of Cambridge.
You must have done very well at school to get into Cambridge.
I think I did fairly well.
Are you being modest?
It's always hard to say. If I look back over the past nine years at the people I was with - it's always hard to keep track after you leave - but I'd say a reasonable number are significantly smarter than I am. I ended up with a degree in genetics and then spent a couple of years out of university, working for the university, doing software development. (I also did) some sysadmin work and I was working on an application called Dasher which is for predictive text entry.
What do you mean by that?
It is a way of entering text; based on what you have entered, the program will try to predict what comes next. The way it works is there's a screen with a number of boxes on it and in each of those boxes is a letter. The size of the box for a particular letter increases based on the likelihood that it will be the next to be chosen. For example, in the English language, the letter q is very rarely used. So q will have a very small box. so If q is used, then q will expand to fill the entire screen, and inside that there will be a different set of boxes. And as q is generally followed by u, the u box will be huge and it will be very easy to enter the u.
What kind of people use this?
The two main markets they were looking at were mobile devices without keyboards and accessibility applications. It was used by people with very limited mobility. Used with a head tracker this is much faster than a keyboard; for example, if you had the ability to move something only in one axis. We came up with a prototype that involved keeping track of people's breathing, so if you breathed in you'd move the pointer upwards and if you breathed out you moved the pointer downwards. And you could demonstrate that just by controlling your breathing you could enter text at about twenty words per minute. Which was, we thought, pretty decent.
