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From...
Why do you need an ever-faster PC?
New PCs will turn their power to social and personal good by adding voice recognition and other ease-of-use improvements.
October 16, 1998
Web posted at: 3:00 PM EDT
by David Needle
(IDG) -- SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA -- As buyers flock to a new generation of fast but inexpensive PCs, suppliers worry that the days of profitably selling huge volumes of latest-greatest PCs may be ending. But a panel of computer experts at the Microprocessor Forum here on Wednesday predicted that there will be no letup in demand for ever more powerful systems -- if that power can be turned toward friendlier user interfaces.
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"There are a lot of things that could be done better with more processing power such as less errors in speech recognition software," said Rick Rashid, vice president of Microsoft Research.
"We think one of the most fruitful uses of [computer power] is to change the way the computer works to suit humans," said Jack Mills, who manages the processor and compiler groups at Intel's Microcomputer Research Lab.
But today's users are hamstrung by decades-old mechanisms for interacting with the computer such as the keyboard and mouse, according to John Canny, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "The freeing of human attention is a very important thing," said Canny. Future systems might employ speech recognition as well as 3D tracking recognition, which Canny said will allow users to point and gesture to get at what they want more naturally.
Ted Selker, an IBM research fellow whose credits include inventing the IBM Trackpoint pointing device, described a prototype system called Interest Tracker that monitors how the user views a document such as a newspaper. If the user gazes at a headline in an online newspaper for more than a few seconds, more details in the article are called up. "We have an interface that allows you to bring things up off a [screen] using your peripheral vision," said Selker.
But Selker emphasized any advances in interfaces should be firmly grounded in making the interaction simpler. "It can't be like riding a helicopter," he commented. "The more things you add on, the more brittle the interface becomes."
Go with the flow, or maybe not
Microsoft's Rashid showed a video of a prototype system that enables "flow apps" to facilitate meetings. The idea is that users in different locations can join meetings at their leisure in a video conference via cameras on their desktop. The flow app system generates a virtual meeting place by projecting the participants' images in a digitally created venue such as a conference table with the Rocky Mountains in the background. Users can view multiple meetings and decide whether to "beam" into one and move on to others as their other duties and interests allow. "We call this 'presence multiplication'", said Rashid, earning derisive laughs from the audience, which didn't seem won over.
While all this technology impressed Jay Bell, a fellow and technical strategist at Dell Computer, he offered a more prosaic suggestion for future software: "Users would consider it a tremendous advance if they could do things only once instead of having to set up their preferences 55 times."