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Research @ The Reading Lab

Reading pervades our culture. We read not only text, but context. The way the words are presented changes their meaning. The form of a reading device affects the way the people understand its content: magazines, books, and newspapers all have different "voices" and ways of presenting information.

Now that much of our text comes to us via computer, cell phone, or television screens, the ways that we understand it are changing. The Reading Lab explores how these changes can help us make sense of the rich data environment in which we live our daily lives. We also explore how they can improve learning, or help people with reading difficulties.

Assistive and educational technologies

One of our missions at The Reading Lab is to make reading both possible and pleasurable for people who have difficulty with print. While we love books and prize the place they hold in our culture, we realize that for some people, books just don't work.  

We create reading experiences tailored for children and adults with ADHD, dyslexia, or other physiological barriers to absorbing print-based text. We also make Power Readers for people with arthritis, tendonitis, or RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury), for whom the simple act of holding a book can be agony.

We tailor our Power Readers to the needs of each individual. With our assistive readers, people with eye difficulties find that aspects of text like contrast or size can be better adjusted for their own personal needs.  Our innovative sensor-based text control systems are designed to empower people with injured hands or other motor difficulties.

  • The AirBook is an assistive reading device that combines dynamic text (especially RSVP, rapid serial visual presentation) with force-free capacitive field sensors to create a simple, easily controlled assistive reading device. This reader is designed to assist people with visual disabilities (like dyslexia, macular degeneration, loss of fine motor control or loss of contrast sensitivity) by giving them more control over font size and contrast. It’s also for people with upper-body disabilities, lack of fine muscle control, or severe arthritis, all of which can make the handling of standard paper books difficult. The force-free sensor system can be adjusted for large-scale motion or for tiny ranges of movement, and requires no pressure or fiddling with physical objects. Here's the CHI short paper on the AirBook.

Experiments in the future of reading

In 1998 our research group at Xerox PARC was invited to create a gallery exhibition at Silicon Valley's new Tech Museum of Innovation. We chose to focus on the intersection of reading with digital technology, and to build real working prototypes of some of our ideas. "XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading" ran from March to September 2000, and tours to other technology and science museums through 2003.

You'll find images and more details about the reading exhibits on the associated sites below.

  • Speeder Reader: Combines the notion of dynamic typography with the notion of the car as interface, or, if you prefer, it's speed-reading with speed-racing controls. A speed-reading protocol called RSVP (for Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) allows people to learn to read up to 2000 words per minute. This is because it flashes words or short phrases onto the screen in front of you, affixed in one spot; you don't have to move your eyes around a page to read. A gas pedal to controls your rate of speed-reading and a steering wheel navigates between streams of text. Here's a preprint of the Computers and Graphics journal paper.

  • The Listen Reader: an interactive children's storybook featuring a rich, evocative ambient soundtrack. We use embedded RFID tags to sense what page we're on, and we use capacitive field sensors to measure human proximity to the pages. Proximity measurements control volume and other expressive parameters of the sounds associated with each page. Here's a preprint of the CHI paper.

  • Walk-In Comix: a graphic novel you can literally walk into -- it's printed on the walls, floor, and ceiling of a small, labyrinthine set of rooms. Talk about getting immersed in a book...This project offered a new take on interactive narrative via static presentation -- and also made us develop some new methods for graphical representation on very large printed surfaces.

 

Exhibits from "XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading." The exhibit was created by the RED group at Xerox PARC, under the direction of Rich Gold.

An overview of the 4000-square-foot gallery space.

Driving through a book: Speeder Reader used a video-game driving interface with dynamic text.

The three Listen Readers created social immersive reading environments.

Walk-In Comix (graphics and story by Mark Stephen Meadows).

Copyright The Reading Lab 2005. Last updated March 20, 2005. Comments welcome.