Tablets.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:
>Now a MUD interface designed against a tablet as its default user
>interface could be interesting.  For the non-table users, the tablet
>layers could be exported to other windows (HUGE screen needed of
>course) to be directly clicked on.  The interactive display itself
>could be also hot (ie reactive to click as permuted against click
>button).  Hurm.  Could be *very interesting.  Gotta think about this.

I've been thinking quite a bit about this in the past.  My conclusion
so far I guess is that this will only become truly useful when flat
screens are becoming more readily availble and tablets is incorporated
in the screen; the "real" touchscreen.  Currently lag is so much of a
problem that I believe it is difficult to make full use of the
increased precision a tablet offers. With current screen resolutions
handwriting isn't really practical as the main form for communication
either.  I think however it could be utilized in an mud designed for
exchanging ideas.  

An assumption: one would no doubt benefit more from combining a mike
(GSM) with a tablet as inputdevices, than by combining a mike and a
keyboard. Short voice comments: "watch this", "wooow", "cool!", "your
turn" combined with grafiti like activities. Not necessarily painting
on walls, more like sketching/carving out the environment in various
ways.  One example: "the burn spell": the distributes the hot
particles over the screen using the tablet, he may choose to
concentrate them in one spot or not. It's easy to come up with ways of
utilizing a tablet...

I believe a tablet could be combined with another idea of mine, a mud
where a page is room, a page is a screen full, a page is dynamic, a
page consists of graphical and sound elements layed out using
constraints, when something changes, the whole page might change.

Ola.