Computers That Pay Attention To Users
from the how-well-does-that-really-work... dept
dsg writes in with another story that tripped my “is this an April Fool’s Day thing…?” filter, about some new work being done on an Attentive User Interface, which is supposed to monitor the attention level of the user, and determine when is the right time to interrupt with any messages. While there might be some value, in some cases, I wonder how well such a system would work in practice. A computer is designed to do certain things – based on what its users ask it to do. If you’re not bothering it, it’s not likely to bother you.
Comments on “Computers That Pay Attention To Users”
Could be useful
Come on — it does tons of stuff for you in the background — cacheing, writing dirty pages to disk, etc. Why not do more in the foreground? For example: some people get a beep when they have new mail (crazy but true). Perhaps you could only get a beep like that when you got mail you wanted (use a bayesian filter to see what you’d read in the past). Perhaps only a beep like that when your machine is idle (or when it’s not idle!). But no beep when you’re in OpenOffice…
Scanning my environment seems a bit over the top, but so did the Window/Mouse/Bitmap display GUI interface in 1973.
Re: Could be useful
True… All good points. I guess I’m more focused on how I tend to use my computer, where I have it set specifically not to “bug” me in any way unless it’s absolutely necessary already. But, maybe that’s a reaction to it having “over bugged” me in the past.
my work PC has an attentive interface...
Its called Windows. Whenever I’m doing something important it always gets my attention by crashing and thrashing whatever I was working on.
🙂