Speeder Reader: Drive your way to better reading skills

Who among us doesn't enjoy spending a lazy afternoon by sliding into the drivers seat, wrapping one hand around the wheel, the other around the stick, and settling in for an exhilarating...speed reading session? Well believe it or not, former Xerox PARCer Maribeth Back has found that using controls analogous to driving allows people to read on-screen text more than twice as fast as they could through traditional left-to-right scanning. Back presented the results of trials involving her reading-cum-driving simulator, the Speeder Reader, at this week's O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference, where she described how streaming text to a fixed spot on the screen allows the reader to eliminate "white space" and ingest words more efficiently. A person "driving" the Java-powered Speeder Reader uses the gas pedal to adjust the pace of the word flow, the steering wheel to change "text lanes" (streaming sources) and the stick and several other buttons for more minor tweaks. Now this is a trend we like to see -- car sims for reading class, DDR action in gym -- pretty soon, kids may be able to play video games all day long in school just like they do all night at home.

[Via Cnet]

[ZSX @ Mar 9th 2006 11:51AM]

I'm sure this is not very new. On my rather prehistoric Cybiko I could read books using a program called "Run Reader" which did pretty much the same thing. It would just project words into sequence on one spot, and you could increase and decrease the speed to what was comfortable.

I can remember reading at about 1200 words per minute before it got rather difficult. "Run Reader" also tried to take note of punctuation, so it would pause briefly after a comma and even longer after a full stop.

Overall it is not as natural as reading and I still prefer the flow of words from side to side.

[Charlie @ Mar 9th 2006 12:06PM]

This is just like an app I use on my Treo sometimes called "buddybuzz"
http://www.buddybuzz.net/rel/Web/index.html

I use it to prevent the eye strain I often get from reading.

[Frederick Chong @ Mar 9th 2006 12:16PM]

What if I get stuck behind the little old lady who's head can barely be seen over the steering wheel?
Jokes aside, I'd probably like to test it. Do the brakes work? Wait a minute, I don't see any brakes, just the GAS!
-----
Frederick Chong
Digital Locksmith
The Gadget Home
http://www.thegadgethome.com

[Michael P @ Mar 9th 2006 12:31PM]

That's a great idea!

Although, like the article said, I don't think the main benefit is through the use of driving-like control system, but more in the fact that the user doesn't have to move their eyes to read and absorb the content.

The only problem is that it promotes a sort of "tunnel vision," (or possibly even a form of "peep-eye") which may get tiresome after awhile.

(...Imagine staring in one spot for an hour and then taking your eyes away from the screen. That would probably be fairly dizzying.)

But yeah, it's good to see people thinking outside the box.

[nike meaker @ Mar 9th 2006 1:24PM]

yeah, not really new. I have used a product on the pocketpc that does the same thing, allowing one to alter the font and color and size and then of course the speed. Select any document and just let it run.

The military created most of these types of things about 30 years ago to aid in FAST data and information absorbtion.

it is simply speed reader plus

[Surj @ Mar 9th 2006 3:49PM]

This is a very very established research area called Rapid Serial Presentation. You can get readers for most Smartphones, PDA's , WIN CE, Java etc etc.

The research was started at PARC ages go. Quite effective, i have the PDA version called Speedreader plus, but the bad part is that everything has to be .txt file and their support is unbelievably bad.

[Martin Krisuk @ Mar 9th 2006 4:12PM]

You mock it, but I am a 16 yr. old sophmore at Mohawk High in PA, and we use DDR in our gym classes.. haha

[glacia00 @ Mar 9th 2006 4:37PM]

I haven't heard of this reading method in years. I recall as others here have software that did this but it never really took off. I recall the problem (for me) was that if I got distracted I lost my place and it took some time to get back to it. Interesting to see it mentioned again.

[Beowulf @ Mar 9th 2006 7:21PM]

This makes me think of Jay Leno's running joke about how lazy & fat Americans have become ...

... now we don't even want to move our eyes to read???

[Monkut @ Mar 9th 2006 8:11PM]

Read about something similar last year.
http://news.com.com/Reading+phone+text+one+word+at+a+time/2100-1046_3-5785579.html?tag=nefd.top

And wrote a simple python script to see what it was like, here it is enjoy!
(download python at: www.python.org)

How fast can you read this way?
===========================================
import os
import time

def displayword(text,sleeptime):

clrscrncmd = "cls" # msdos clear screen

for word in text.split(" "):
print word
time.sleep(sleeptime)
os.system(clrscrncmd)


text = """
Who among us doesn't enjoy spending a lazy afternoon by sliding into the drivers seat, wrapping one hand around the wheel, the other around the stick, and settling in for an exhilarating speed reading session? Well believe it or not, former Xerox PARCer Maribeth Back has found that using controls analogous to driving allows people to read on-screen text more than twice as fast as they could through traditional left-to-right scanning. Back presented the results of trials involving her reading-cum-driving simulator, the Speeder Reader, at this week's O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference, where she described how streaming text to a fixed spot on the screen allows the reader to eliminate "white space" and ingest words more efficiently. A person "driving" the Java-powered Speeder Reader uses the gas pedal to adjust the pace of the word flow, the steering wheel to change "text lanes" (streaming sources) and the stick and several other buttons for more minor tweaks. Now this is a trend we like to see -- car sims for reading class, DDR action in gym -- pretty soon, kids may be able to play video games all day long in school just like they do all night at home.
"""

pause = .5

displayword(text,pause)
===========================================

[Casey In MD @ Mar 9th 2006 10:04PM]

Ahh 50 years ago, we had the same thing - only with 35mm filmstrip and a little reader

[Elliot Lee @ Mar 10th 2006 7:42PM]

ZSX: YES! Another Cybiko user! I grew up with that device - I learned C programming with it.