A GUI For Books

NASA's Goddard Flight Center has just issued a contract to use Touch User Interface technology from a company called Somatic Digital. Their "TouchBooks" let printed material connect to digital devices via sensors in the covers. (C'mon, don't tell me you've never pressed on a URL on a printed page and expected something to happen.) This page on the vendor's site has videos of a 7-year-old using a TouchBook. Works with XP and OS X.

What about Grandma?

[amigabill]

This page on the vendor's site has videos of a 7-year-old using a TouchBook.

OK, but little kids pick up on things pretty well. Like grandma asking little Timmy to open her child-proof medecine bottle for her.

Show me a video of my grandma using this thing and I'll be impressed.

/[search-pattern]

[GillBates0]

C'mon, don't tell me you've never pressed on a URL on a printed page and expected something to happen.

I can tell you I've never tried "pressing" a URL on anywhere other than an electronic screen (not even physical hyperlinks (Semacodes [wikipedia.org]).

What I miss more in hard copies of books though, is an easy search/grep functionality. Yeah, Indexes and Table of Contents try to achieve this to a certain extent, but that's nothing compared to the search capability in Electronic documents.

On countless occasions, after a long day of poring over text in vi, and searching for text as easily as "/[search-pattern]", I miss the same capability when I sit down to read a printed book.

And no, I don't want to go to http://books.google.com/ [google.com] when I want to find the last page I read that I read a Character's name on in my mystery novel.

7 year old!

[CaseyB]

Wow, it's an interface so simple, a 7 year old can use it!

I think you're a little out of touch with modern kids. My son would was perfectly comfortable using a mouse, keyboard, and joystick to launch and play his favorite games. At 3. My wife does simple spreadsheets with her grade 1 class.

A Bad Leapfrog Implementation

[smccto]

Isn't this pretty much the same thing as the Leapfrog products? Leapfrog uses a magnetic stylist to monitor where the child is pressing on the page but this is certainly nothing new. And definitely nothing exciting or well done.

Re:any real users of this tech ?

[ConceptJunkie]

The technology will be there soon. For instance, 600dpi ePaper with optional (but not necessary) backlighting. A display that looks as good as the output of a decent laser printer will be around in the next decade or so. The capacity to store any amount of reading material you would ever want on a device the size of a pocket paperback is there now.

The reason it will never take off is because for the same price as a paperback + $1.99, you will get a single eBook that's encrusted with DRM, can't be transferred to a different device and, if the capriciousness of content providers continues on the path it is now, will expire (and self-delete) in a month.