on 28 March 2008Great excitement this month at the latest Apple hardware announcements. Not the brand new MacBooks that are exactly the same as before but with a marginally faster processor and a bit more memory on the graphics card. That wasn’t really what you’d call exciting. Not even with the inclusion of a Multi-Touch trackpad that works exactly the same way as on the iPhone, except that instead of touching the item you’re trying to manipulate, you’re staring at it on a display six inches away while trying to manipulate an invisible facsimile of it on a plain grey bit of plastic. Bemusement, yes. Excitement, no.
Desktop publishing users may have been somewhat enervated, I suppose, to discover that the revamped 17 inch still doesn’t include the proper numeric keypad they need for all their shortcuts, despite having enough empty space around the keyboard to open a city farm. But the only people actually excited by the new MacBooks would have been people who’d been going around saying the Mac division had lost the plot, and could now continue to do so in the knowledge that nobody was likely to jump up with a convincing counter-argument.
No, this month’s big news, of course, was the announcement by Kazuhiro Taniguchi, at Osaka University’s Graduate School of Engineering Science, of a device enabling the control of an iPod by blinking. Who hasn’t dreamed of that? Kevin Keegan, after all, struggles weekly to manage the Newcastle defence using only a series of despairing facial expressions. Steve Wozniak, though officially an Apple employee, has apparently found no other way to influence the company’s product design strategy for the last decade than by moving his mouth in the presence of the media.
As Kevin, Woz, and anyone who’s ever tried glaring meaningfully at an errant toddler will know only too well, any attempt to control stuff using only your face is normally doomed to failure. But Taniguchi’s gizmo, described as a ‘temple switch’, actually works. It can be attached to a pair of glasses, which is probably quite sensible, but somehow any invention involving glasses immediately conjures up a nutty professor peering through thick-rimmed bottle-bottoms.
More promisingly, you can also clip it to your headphones. Unfortunately, if the publicity photo does not lie, and for once I suspect it doesn’t, this results in you going around with something stuck on your ear that resembles a cross between an NHS hearing aid and a set of fairy lights. Un peu geeky, no?
If you can put up with the stylectomy, all you have to do is blink to start a music track and blink again to stop it. Now, I know what you’re thinking, but Taniguchi reckons the software can tell if you did it deliberately. It’s all about how long the blink lasts. An iPod-controlling blink, as opposed to a not-being-a-zombie blink, means closing your eyes for a full second. ‘It doesn’t malfunction even if the user walks and runs,’ he claims. Well, OK, it doesn’t malfunction, but surely that’s going to be the least of your worries? If you’ve ever felt nervous about wandering around busy streets with earphones clamped in your lugholes, try periodically shutting your eyes while doing it. Anyway, what about sneezing?
Things get trickier still if you want to change tracks. You’re supposed to wink your left eye to skip backwards, or your right eye to go forwards. Who the heck is this designed for, Mae West? I spent many a dull schoolday learning to wink, but I can still only do it with one eye. The left, as luck would have it. If temple-switching catches on, I’m doomed to reversing through my music. As soon as a track comes up that I don’t like, I’ll have to listen to the previous one over and over again until the batteries run out or the pollen count rises.
Ah, they’ve thought of that too. ‘There are some people who are incapable of winking one eye. For those, we can program the system to give a command when they blink twice in a fast sequence.’ Hang on, did someone not get the memo about the slow blinking? And what happens if you can’t blink either eye? Two blinks forward, three blinks back? Just as you finally manage to skip the Arctic Monkeys, you’ll be carted off and treated for epilepsy.
What they also seem to have overlooked is the possibility that you might actually need to wink at someone. There are whole swathes of the South East where temple-switching is just never going to catch on. ‘Awroight darlin’ – bleedin’ ’ell, the Ar’tic bleedin’ Mahnkeys again.’
Taniguchi is working on a device that responds to users clenching their teeth instead. But this surely carries even more risk of false responses. Nobody wants their iPod to skip every time they see Fearne Cotton.
Adam Banks wrote this using an amazing new invention that translates hand gestures into text input.
adambanksdotcom @gbarl Bah, missed your Watchdog. Do they do it on iPlayer?