| abstract
| - I was shopping at a local Wal Mart this weekend when I came across $98.00 Blu Ray players. Alot of them, shelves FULL! Everyone was just walking by I didn’t see anyone buying them or even giving them a second look. Seems to me the interest is fading. Sony may have really screwed up on this format, just like every other format they’ve come up with. Regards Eau Claire WI Dear Buzz Crew, I have to comment on the gaze-tracking privacy software discussed in Wednesday’s episode 1014. Tom was absolutely correct that it shows normal text to the authorized user and gibberish to everyone else. (At least for the high-end product Chameleon; the consumer product PrivateEye just obscures the whole screen.) I guess not everyone has taken a visual perception class, so I’ll try to explain. We have the intuitive impression that our eyes behave like cameras – constantly reading in all the pixels, and smoothly panning around from object to object. Not so at all! Half of your visual cortex is devoted to the central two degrees of your visual field. That works out to half an inch of good focus area at a standard reading distance of 14 inches. Moreover, your eyes constantly jump around in incredibly fast, involuntary movements called saccades, only pausing for about 200 milliseconds at a time. During the saccades, visual input is suppressed. With decent gaze-tracking equipment (such as from you local college’s cognitive psychology department), you can flash up pictures of penguins during saccades, and the user won’t notice anything odd. Here’s a video showing someone’s eye movements while reading Google search results: And yes, your eyes still jump around even when you’re reading a structured text document. Chameleon just fills everything except the tiny, fluctuating area you’re looking at with random text. Thanks for this and all the other cool stories! (mouse over “oculis in action”)
|