Human-sensing Computer Monitors

I've been looking forward to this for a while:

Eizo's new screens boast a new Green 'auto off' feature that turns off the computer monitor when you walk away to get a cup of joe. I hope it's smart enough to not turn off when you're simply sitting still. I hope it becomes standard — I'm frustrated by the fact the computer doesn't know I'm sitting there enjoying a TED video and the screen dims! It's a nice start to a more context-aware computer
(Via fareastgizmos.com)

I discussed this idea previously in my blogpost on 3D cameras:

Imagine your computer recognizing when you walk in front of it. Or putting itself to sleep when you walk out of a room

Comments

[Nick Forge]

For the "ultimate" User Experience, we would need the OS to have system wide concepts of particular types of tasks that the user is doing.

e.g.

If your app was a movie player, it would register with the OS that it is in "MediaPlaybackMode", and that it shouldn't be interrupted.

When you jumped out of full screen mode, or stopped playing, the app would notify the OS that it was no longer in "MediaPlaybackMode", and allow interruptions.

With a few simple "Modes" like this, the OS (and 3rd party apps) could make helpful decisions based on what task the user was doing on the computer as well as what they were physically doing.

[Keith Lang]

This is a good point. When you play a DVD on a Mac, the screen doesn't go to sleep. And I believe there are API calls which you can make to stop a cpu going to sleep — for example if the app is rendering some complex stuff for many hours.

So making that API call available to Flash movie players etc seems worthwhile.

A friend brought up the interesting phenomenon when people are sitting at a machine, particularly a laptop which has it's screen slightly dimmed (not full screen sleep) . As soon as the screen dims, and despite them not using the machine as they talk to a friend, they will still brush the machines trackpad in order to have the screen remain at full brightness.

Anyone else noticed this, or other strange behavior like it?

[Nick Forge]

I regularly play with the sleep state on my iPod Touch - if it goes to sleep, I'll awaken it "just because". I don't do the thing with the laptop screen brightness, but that's because I'm much more conscious than most about battery life and energy efficiency. If I wasn't aware or didn't care, I'd probably do the trackpad thing too.

On the topic of the OS wide "Usage Modes" (can't think of a better name right now), it's been something that has frustrated me for some time. Any application that grabs or distracts the users attention should really be hooked into a system wide API that decides what sort of alerts are appropriate.

e.g. When I'm watching a DVD, I don't want any Twitter, IM or Mail notifications, audio or visual. I should be able to tell my OS "I'm working now, disable all communication notifications", or "I'm not working, distract me as much as you want".

I can't really see Apple implementing something like this in OS X any time in the foreseeable future, since it's a bit forward looking, and for most people it would just be a source of confusion. I can just imagine the thousands of Apple Support Forum threads "Why isn't Mail making alert sounds anymore?" etc.

A well crafted 3rd-party framework + utilities may be the best way to achieve this goal.

[Keith Lang]

The Growl service and framework on the mac is a good first step and is widely supported. Worth checking out if you've not already.

http://growl.info/

[Vincent Gable]

You can turn the new mail sound to Mail.app off with the AppleScript
tell application "Mail" to set new mail sound to "None"
and on like
tell application "Mail" to set new mail sound to "New Mail.aiff"

[Keith Lang]

@ Vincent, IMLocation looks very cool, something I've wanted for a while!