Hello,
I vented my frustration on Twitter, and your media team asked me to contact you directly.
First some background:
I was working as a senior inspector at the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, when ALS struck me in 2010, at the age of 36. By 9/2013, my paralysis had progressed to a degree when I switched to PCEye Go. A year later, I lost my ability to speak completely, and Tobii (first PCEye Go, then PCEye Plus) has been my only means of communication ever since. I am fully paralyzed and spend all my time in bed. I have a 27" screen on a table in front of me and spend 17-18 hours a day using Tobii. I was able to continue in my day job until 2017, after that I've been concentrating on my own projects, such as writing sci-fi novels, 3D designing with OpenSCAD, coding with Perl, etc. The Windows Control is excellent for such use. Sometimes I also watch movies with my wife and 8yo daughter. I have the screen divided in two: 75% for the movie and 25% for Windows Notepad so that I can discuss the movie with little Svea.
There are two things that make the Windows Control stand out.
1) The keyboard layout. With nothing to distract the flow and with equally-spaced squares, the layout enables super fast typing. I have the system at the fastest setting, and last time I checked, reached the rate of 2.6 characters per second. But here comes the catch: every fifth or so hit is a miss, so the backspace is visited frequently. Hitting a wrong key is not a problem though: since they are all plain letters, you can just hit the backspace to undo the miss without giving it any thought. (There is one minor caveat though: most chat and messenger apps send a message when you hit enter, and often you mistakenly hit enter when reaching for backspace. This makes instant messaging quite stressful. My suggestion is to swap the position of space and enter to avoid mistakenly hitting enter instead of backspace.)
2) The command bar is out of the way. I can relax and watch the movie, read a text, etc. without having to stress that I accidentally click it. And yet, as soon as I want to click or type, all I need to do is to throw a glance at the command bar. Better yet, you can adjust the precision and still do the click with just two eye operations. In my opinion, those who designed the Windows Control user interface were nothing short of genius. I have very little suggestions on how it could have been improved further (well, the menu that opens from the control bar is cluttered to the point of being useless, and the ".com", smilies, etc. on a single tangent break the rule of being undoable with a single hit on the backspace...)
A couple of months ago, I decided to buy the new PCEye 5 as a backup device, in case the PCEye Plus breaks down. (As I mentioned, I am totally dependent on the device for all communication.) My first impression was that I was not able to type at even a fraction of the speed I was accustomed to. Since that could just have been a matter of getting used to, I kept benchmarking for over a month, but the situation didn't improve at all. After reading above the two points about what is good about Windows Control, it is clear what is bad about Computer Control:
1) The keyboard layout. The upper row distracts the flow. Since the function keys to toggle between numbers, letters, and symbols are now among the letters, you keep mistakenly hitting them, unintentionally switching to number keys etc. in the middle of a sentence. This seriously distracts the flow, especially since the miss isn't undoable with a single hit on the backspace. And besides distracting, the fourth row causes the keyboard to take too much space on the screen, often covering the area where you are supposed to type.
2) The circle following your gaze is constantly in the way. It distracts you when reading, and especially when watching a movie with someone. You need to pause the interface to get rid of the annoying circle, but then you can't scroll or discuss the movie. And where the accurate mouse click with Windows Control only required two eye operations (select the button->point at the position), now you need five: stop your gaze at the position->hit activation->select the fine tuning tool->stop your gaze at the accurate position->select the button. Imagine toggling a long row of check boxes with this system! (I tried.)
The way I see it, the legacy Windows Control is an almost perfect eye gaze interface. The rapid typing it enables makes it possible for me to pass as a normal person. No way I could have written this with the new Computer Control. I strongly suggest (read: beg) that you make the effort of making this brilliant interface compatible with the new device, so that people like me can keep living even after the legacy devices eventually break down.
Regards,
-Riku
