Explanation: This is only vaguely SVG-ish but has to do with events, web-apps, interface and drawing. I thought the SVG-developers group would have significant expertise here, and possible interest. (I'm also not sure if a posting to [EMAIL PROTECTED] as a non-member would actually work or not -- and whether or not it would be welcome from outside). It is long, so unless the topics in the subject line actually interest you, please don't worry about reading it. I got an i-phone a couple of weeks ago and have registered as a higher education iphone developer-something-or-other. Have only started to unpack the developers' goodies. It looks like "hello world" is a significant fraction of a megabyte, so am not sure how quick I'll be to actually crawl into that mind set. The reason I got it is that I teach courses at the senior level in an undergraduate CS/IT program in interface design. The idea of having multiple points of touch has always appealed to me. After working on the PLATO system as a grad student where we read lots of Minsky and Richard Karp, and getting to see the Xerox Star system in one of my prof's offices, I had begun to develop ideas about rich interfaces. My reaction to the first Mac I saw in '84 was "what only one mouse? I will clearly need two." [to sculpt anything three dimensional, for example]. The apple folks that I had access to at the time were goodhearted salesfolk who nodded and smiled. Finally, now, as I approach my dotage, I might have the opportunity to program with more than one point of contact with the user. And 3D accelerometers! What fun will that be? How might we use 3D accelerometers to carve our space into wonderful shapes? Now my friends at Opera have been telling me for more than a year now about all the wonderful stuff they have in Opera including the 3D canvas. I haven't had time to play, nor even to learn about it yet, but it can't be much more complex than abc or xyz now can it? So, I guess as I try to help my university figure out whether or not its expense in buying me an iphone has paid off, I need to see if I can make the little gadget do anything. I have two ideas. 1. Make it into a 3D mouse for an Opera 3D canvas. 2. Use it to make a gestural semantics that a) works better than a keyboard and/or b) works really well for folks already conversant with ASL. Let me explicate a little and then see if anyone has either suggestions or a willingness to participate in such an endeavor. 1. One of the little apps that ships as an example (I still remember what wonderful things Sun shipped with JDK1.1) is just a little time-based plotter of acceleration data in x, y and z axes. Differentiate that curve twice, it seems and you've got locations in 3space (though the curve may be so discontinuous that the derivatives become screwy -- so then smooth the curve first). How fast can one stream that data, and through what protocol (HTTPRequest?) and port (80?) does the little i-phone actually send data? Can I plop it out quickly enough so that it could be streamed to a server and thence through ajax or json (or just plain old cgi-text) to a browser that I could draw into a 3D canvas running in Opera (or Safari or whoever else implements a 3D canvas?) Or has anybody implemented enough of the websockets stuff yet that we could do it that way, with presumably greater speed? Some may say that I should just get a 3D mouse of some sort and hook it via infrared/microwave/radio directly to a device on which I can draw, but that's hardly as much fun and considerably lower level than I would like to play. Having it web-accessible means it can be broadcast and that's rather nice too. Though I know, there's always closed circuit TV, but again I don't really care about that. The fundamental question is how can we get those data from a gadget (like an i-phone) to a web page quickly? 2. The keyboards on these little gadgets are way too small for someone who grew up decades before the generation of "texting" YMKWIM (you must know what I mean) While I appreciate the parsimony of highly fluent texting, I would rather learn Chinese or polish my Mongolian if I had the time. One time, when I was a young psychology and math professor, I was invited to a party of people all of whom (except me) spoke ASL. I watched as three people all "talked" and understood one another all at the same time. I was amazed. They said it was commonplace. I knew of research suggesting that the baud rate of the visual system was considerably higher (like 100 fold) larger than that of the auditory system, though I also knew how some had disputed that research. But here was something remarkable. Three people speaking and listening concurrently! So here's the idea: instead of typing with a tiny keyboard can we use the 3D accelerometers to convey fundamental units of meaning (such as, but better than, the alphabet)? Gesture(X+Y+)(X-Z+)(Y+) = "generic action" ; Gesture(X+Y+Z-)(X-) = "nominalizer" ; etc. A collection of suitable semantic primitives (notwithstanding my negative results (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=12453.12456&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE) is discussed in a beginning explanation of work I am dusting off after 30 years that it lay dormant -- see the "Meaning" topic and link at http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/words/ . Or we may prefer an alphabet: Gesture(X+Y+)(X-Z+)(Y+) = "A" ; Gesture(X+Y+)(X+Z-)(Y+) = "B" Whether we semanticize using a set of semantic primitives, or using ASL or using an alphabet, the question is still the same: can we define a gestural semantic language that works as efficiently as a keyboard? For some years I have argued (mostly for fun, but somewhat for real) that the development of speech was not really an advance for humans -- that moving from gesture to grunting may have freed our hands to pick vegetables as sharecroppers in some would-be pharaoh's grand vision of the future, but overall it is not necessarily the quickest way to get ideas across. The later transition to the written word, whereupon many languages merely alphabetized speech was just a way of entrenching a questionnable first step. The transition from writing to printing and then to HTML helped, but mainly because of liberalization in modes of distribution.* If we move back to the roots of communication, then maybe gestural semantics, is, in the grand scheme, a faster way of getting ideas from mind to mind. And so long as our display devices and visual systems are primarily 2D, then that's where SVG comes in. At any rate, ideas 1 and 2 above seem worthy of some real work and I'm wondering if anybody might want to help write a grant or fund a grant or volunteer some time or sign on as a paid worker on a grant or point toward ways of actually doing any of the mechanics of talking from one of these gadgets to a web app? In the meantime, does the W3C have to worry about standardizing 3-D accelerometer events or stream protocols? I suppose we have a sample frame rate, a smoothing function (possibly invertable?), and ranges/min-max normalized across x y and z, and then the xyz triplets? Is that the sort of stuff the webapps group does? cheers David * Though printing gave access to embedded engravings and that was a clear step forward, and certainly the "hyper" in hypertext was actually an advance, by fundamentally recognizing the extra-linear nature of both thought and expression. (Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was actually pretty cool)
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