While digitizing my analog videotapes, I came across a short 1989 demo by Bill Gaver of his SonicFinder™, an interesting piece of early work on audio in user interfaces. It's easy to find online copies of research papers describing The SonicFinder™, but I was surprised to find that the Internet doesn't seem to offer anything like the video demo I have. That's a shame, because hearing audio and seeing it in action is a lot more illuminating than reading about it.
With Bill's kind permission, here is a digitized copy of the videotape he gave me in 1989 (presumably when he came to give a talk at Brown University, where I was pursuing graduate work in Computer Science). It's short--not quite three minutes long. Enjoy!
9 comments:
So painful ...
That's very interesting! Why don't you put it on YouTube?
@Prasun: I don't have a YouTube channel, and I can't be bothered to set one up. If you'd like to publish it there, let me know, and I will share the original video with you. (I think the one Google shows is lower resolution than the SD original I have.)
That's brilliant :-) Shame it didn't make it to any of the mainstream OSs, such a wonderful idea!
Oh this is a very nifty idea, I like it when computers become a little more experiential... Maybe audible cues for casual computer users could be revisited nowadays
@Mars-Wave: I think that computers in the form of smart phones incorporate a lot of audio cues, e.g., for incoming phone calls or text messages or email, for outgoing messages and email, for alarms and timers going off, etc. I'm not familiar with any systems that use sounds in the same way as the SonicFinder, but I think sound is now a well-established part of computer interfaces.
I do agree, but I see that more as the inheritance of pagers and variable reward phone notifications for engagement. Thanks to this FS video I was thinking about making an ambient noise wireshark sniffer based on circular queues so that I can know what the traffic in my homelab is up to via the sound of a stream or foliage... I rarely delve in subtlety and constantly obsess in determinate function, so this would be a nice change of pace. Average use of General purpose AI is an indicator to me that we are past the efficient, function over form point since we'd rather put a lot of resources to waste for something "cool". I think nice audible cues really enrich some otherwise bland interfaces...
I used to imagine ways to monitor systems audibly so that you could have them on as background noise and pay attention to them only when they started to sound wrong. I never got beyond the "thinking about it" stage, but I think there are probably a lot of opportunities in this area.
Right?!? I mean, don't we do it already with any other tech like water heater, car etc...? Also tech listens to us, like HDDs and shouting in the server rooms
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