Comment by antileet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antileet | Hacker News Reader

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Remember when voice recognition was all the rage? I remember when I was younger and some kid on the block got a copy of some voice recognition software. Plus, he was the only one with a computer with horsepower to run it. Anyways, we all sat down and tried to train it - given the fact that we were in India and our accent isn't very easily understandable by most humans, let alone computers - we did see some results.

That kid would have the time of his life saying "Open solitaire" loudly and clearly into the microphone a gazillion times, and the system would interpret it as "delete my homework" or "email grandma all my private files".

All this seems pretty neat, but when it comes to just getting a little work done - I'm still skeptical about how much advantage touch, motion, gestures, speech, etc will help.

I am very excited about gaze tracking though. I don't think it's too long before I can switch from one window to another by just looking at it and twitching my eye.

> All this seems pretty neat, but when it comes to just getting a little work done - I'm still skeptical about how much advantage touch, motion, gestures, speech, etc will help.

Probably major advantages for people with physical disabilities and repetitive strain injuries.

> I don't think it's too long before I can switch from one window to another by just looking at it and twitching my eye.

Most X11 window managers support the option for Focus Follows Mouse, where simply hovering over a different window will make it the active window, and after a short delay, bring it to the front of the window stack if necessary. Just combine this with "Multi Pointer X" and a gaze tracking camera that acts as another mouse input, and you could have what you're looking for...

I'm pretty sure I would want things to happen more or less only when I take some action with my hands (gaze AND click/keypress). Things opening, closing, raising, lowering, or otherwise flying around purely on the basis of my gaze would probably be disorienting, or there would be a lot of false positives. ("I don't WANT that window to raise!")

Windows don't raise unless clicked. They only take keyboard focus when hovered. Of course, desktop environments like Gnome and KDE don't do this anymore by default, to accommodate the converts from Windows and MacOS.

Edit: the focus-stealing prevention already built into window managers could be combined with the gaze tracking to allow you to type into one window while reading from another.

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