Reading

I almost forgot to write a blog about the reading for this week.

I enjoyed the first two chapters. One part that stood out to me was the comparison of the modern spreadsheet application to its original ancestor. I had never really thought about the history of spreadsheets. I was surprised however to see that it was pretty much fully developed on the first iteration. Looking at Excel, there is no feature that I use regularly that wasn't in VisiCalc. It's very impressive how an effective interface design has such incredible staying power. It could have been changed at any time, and there's intense selection pressure to do so. A more efficient or easy to use spreadsheet application would be very popular. However, even Apple's new Numbers application doesn't differ much from the form set out by VisiCalc's designers.

Head Mounted Display

This looks super cool. There's a toy being sold that has a head mounted video display as a part of it. The headset can be bought as a replacement part for twenty dollars. It uses standard signals (NTSC or PAL) and can, with very little work, be hacked into a new role in a custom project.

This would make a neat little reality augmentation display or virtual reality display. Plus, there's nothing to stop a developer from buying two and making a stereoscopic display.

Obviously no commercial product would be tolerated with a black and white screen anymore, but this is a boon for hobby work and prototypes.

(via Hack-a-Day)