THE NEXT time you start falling asleep during a lecture, just pull out your
personal digital assistant. A new PDA program will let you grab鈥攐r 鈥渟narf鈥�
in geekspeak鈥攖he contents of a computerised slide, scribble on it and then
send your handiwork back to the big screen for everyone to see.
The real goal of the system is to make interactive meetings easier. 鈥淲e call
it 鈥榮emantic snarfing鈥� because our system allows you to take only the part of
the slide that has meaning for you, whether it be a string of text or a photo,鈥�
says Brad Myers, who developed the system with his students at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh. He demonstrated his snarfing system at the Ubiquitous
Computing conference in Atlanta, Georgia, last week.
First you use a laser pointer to select the portion of the slide you want to
snarf. A camera on the PC that鈥檚 running software like Microsoft鈥檚 PowerPoint
presentation package tracks the movement of the pointer.
Advertisement
When you press a button on your PDA, it contacts the PC and wirelessly
downloads your selection. Then you can save your chosen excerpt, edit or doodle
on it and send it back to the computer, where your colleagues can admire your
handiwork鈥� or not.