I enjoyed playing with Dasher when I was in college circa 2003. Has the project advanced at all since then, or has it simply been ported to modern operating systems? The website still displaying photos of Palm hardware doesn’t inspire confidence. That said, it worked fine for what it was in 2003, so maybe it doesn’t need to advance further?
I am not aware of advancements. I posted it because the ‘Markov chain keyboard’ post reminded me of it.
Surely it does need to be improved.
For one, I always thought it would be nice if the “wall of new letters” was curved, so that you don’t have to move your finger farther for letters at the top or bottom of the wall than you do the middle..
The input method might be made more expressive by taking in additional datapoints other than just x-y position. (This would defeat the Dasher Project’s goal of being useful to users with major disabilities.)
Some text editing capabilities would be nice. I recall being pained each time I had to “backspace” a whole line to fix a little typo at the beginning…
According to the official repo, the implementation is licensed under GPL2.
Is the concept itself (rather than the implementation) encumbered by any patents or anything like that? I tried to find out, but the wiki, the FAQ, and the mailing list are respectively dead, dead, and members-only. (Also, maybe this kind of thing could not be encumbered? IANAL.)
I enjoyed playing with Dasher when I was in college circa 2003. Has the project advanced at all since then, or has it simply been ported to modern operating systems? The website still displaying photos of Palm hardware doesn’t inspire confidence. That said, it worked fine for what it was in 2003, so maybe it doesn’t need to advance further?
I am not aware of advancements. I posted it because the ‘Markov chain keyboard’ post reminded me of it.
Surely it does need to be improved.
For one, I always thought it would be nice if the “wall of new letters” was curved, so that you don’t have to move your finger farther for letters at the top or bottom of the wall than you do the middle..
The input method might be made more expressive by taking in additional datapoints other than just x-y position. (This would defeat the Dasher Project’s goal of being useful to users with major disabilities.)
Some text editing capabilities would be nice. I recall being pained each time I had to “backspace” a whole line to fix a little typo at the beginning…
According to the official repo, the implementation is licensed under GPL2.
Is the concept itself (rather than the implementation) encumbered by any patents or anything like that? I tried to find out, but the wiki, the FAQ, and the mailing list are respectively dead, dead, and members-only. (Also, maybe this kind of thing could not be encumbered? IANAL.)
I suspect folks who use an eyegaze computer to speak like MLS / MD sufferers are watching this technology carefully.
Very cool!