Podkayne's Dispatches from the Inhabited Planets

Speeder Reader is a device that looks very much like a car driving video game. On the floor is a gas pedal. On the console is a steering wheel and a stick shift. On the screen is a speedometer and above that, where the front window would normally be, there are words flashing rapidly. While the visitor sees only one word at a time, the words are replacing each other at the rate of several hundred per minute. Instead of seeing a sentence with words all in a row, here the visitor sees the words of the sentence appear one after the other. The gas pedal determines how fast the words flash by. The steering wheel moves between various "lanes" of words where each lane is a different story. The speedometer, of course, tells the visitor how many words per minute he or she is reading.

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What's it about? Podkayne's Dispatches from the Inhabited Planets is the diary of a young girl who takes a space ship to visit each of the planets in the solar system. Each lane of text is about a different planet. The stick shift switches between different aspects of her visits to the planets. The visitor has the option of reading each planet's diary all the way through or skipping rapidly around the solar system.

What is the experiment? Speeder Reader is an experiment in RSVP reading (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) and how it might be used to read literature. Another aspect of the experiment is to merge what the story is about (travelling) with the metaphor of the reading device (driving). Speeder Reader also addresses one of the vexing problems of RSVP. While RSVP holds much promise, it often suffers from a lack of context; it's easy for the reader to lose track of where they are in a text. Speeder Reader is a probe into the use of physical navigation metaphors as one possible solution.

How does it work? RSVP is a well-known method of reading. It allows for very fast reading. Using RSVP some people can read 2000 words per minute, compared with most people's reading rate that averages about 300 words per minute. The program that displays the words and controls the gas pedal and steering wheel is written in Java. The text of the story is embedded in an XML (Extended Markup Language) format somewhat like HTML (the coding language of the World Wide Web). This format allows for different fonts, colors, lanes and so on to be easily specified.