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January 15, 2005
The Skywriter and embodied interaction c.1981
After reading Webb’s post about his new “wave messaging active cover” (also here)for his phone, I decided to track down one of my most favorite childhood toys on ebay: the Skywriter. About $20 netted me one still mint-in box after 24 years.
It’s pretty much the same as Webb’s phone cover: you type a short message (only 40 characters—boo!), then wave the thing back and forth in an arc. The letters march across the arc as you wave, and thanks to persistence of vision, you can read them. It definately does work better in dim light, as one of Webb’s photos proves. Our aging digital camera wasn’t quick enough to capture my first attempts well. Here’s me trying to wave a single word “Andrew”:
In a darker room, I had better luck with “Hello World”. (No, I’m not spelling “blo wad” in the last picture; that’s a side effect of the camera.)
I broke my last Skywriter at age 11 when I took it apart to see how it worked. As you wave it, you can hear a tiny ball bearing rattling around in the business end of the wand. It’s obviously using the bearing to track the arc endpoints, from which the Skywriter can calculate the time between waves. If you stop abruptly and look at the LEDs on the front, you can usually catch it flickering through a letter or two.
There’s no way this thing would have the same fun-in-the-pub effect Webb’s phone had. It’s cumbersome to enter messages: the keypad is alphabetical, not laid out like a typewriter keyboard, so it’s easy to make typos; each key input is confirmed by a flashing light on the other side of the wand, making it hard to know if you’ve pressed a letter firmly enough; and it has only a few characters of bare-bones punctuation, so no emoticons or pointing arrows or even exclamation marks. Also no saving of old messages. The wand is also needlessly burly (it does look very 1981, no? Kind of ), which makes it uncomfortable to grip and tends to hurt the forearm after a few messages.
But these are the limitations—except maybe for the tired arm—that newer technology can easily overcome with a bit of memory, a screen for seeing what you’re typing, and the more familiar text interface of the phone keypad. And of course in an 18” hunk of plastic there’s very little of the immediacy one has with a pocket-sized phone accessory. Were the limits of the lower-tech ‘81 version of wave messaging what kept it from becoming a more common “embodied interaction”?
Posted by Andrew at January 15, 2005 02:04 PM