Word: goldings
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...Monday morning in early November, fitness fanatics, connected to computers featuring personalized workout data, pedal on stationary bikes. Nearby, several people scale a rock-climbing wall. All wear heart monitors on their wrists and gold-and-black T shirts bearing the logo of their facility, the Madison Health Club. As one biker gets caught up in watching the presidential candidates duke it out on TV, her heart-rate monitor starts beeping. "Oops," she says, embarrassed to draw the attention of her teacher. "That means I'm out of my target zone...
...practical, down-to-earth business of making the Web more readable. He uses the jargon of Internet ecology, talking about the way we "forage" for information and hunt its "scent" to produce a balanced "diet." But that doesn't make his tools and results any less gee-whiz than Gold's. Step into Card's lab, and he will show you the device he uses on his test subjects, a metal headpiece with little cameras positioned in front of each eye. This scary-looking machine records your saccadic jumps while you hunt for information, and notes how long it takes...
...anymore. Printed text, which has remained basically unchanged since Gutenberg first got his fingers inky, is about to bloom into a thousand different forms. The one you use will increasingly depend on what you need to use it for. "The tyranny of the static book is over," says Rich Gold, head of the Research on Experimental Documents (RED) team at Xerox PARC. "The digital revolution can incorporate radical new visions of reading...
...Both Gold and Card have this aim in mind, but there the similarities end. Gold is deeply tanned, ponytailed and fast talking, with a background in experimental music and toy design. His group has spent the past couple of years dreaming up utterly outlandish text-display inventions like Speeder Reader. There's the Tilty Table, a vast and thin computer screen on shock absorbers that you tilt in any direction to scroll through a document that would in real life be 30 ft. across; Listen Reader, which uses tiny embedded computer chips to produce different ambient sounds on each page...
...Gold's RED team seems to have reached the same conclusion: it's O.K. to skim, and it's O.K. to read pictures instead of text. Its Hyperbolic Reader (based on the hyperbolic tree, a Xerox PARC invention) tells a children's story in Perspective Wall style. Cartoons and speech bubbles grow large as you move a joystick over them, then shrink as you turn to another part of the story's tree. In Fluid Fiction (also created with PARC software), another children's story is told in just 24 sentences. But touch the end of any sentence...