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Point · Which? · it guesses

Element 56

56◕›
Th
That

Point, and let it work out what you mean by 'that'.

point-and-speak · circle it

First known

Opened

1980Put-That-There: you say 'that' while pointing, and 'that' means whatever you point at. Richard Bolt, MIT Architecture Machine Group.

“the user employs the pronoun "that," simultaneously pointing to what is intended ... "That" is thus defined as whatever is pointed out”

The paper calls it 'ostensively defined': the word is resolved by the gesture made at the same moment.

Someone opened the dated document itself. The source.

  • ReadingValue

Specimen № 56 — operate freely

Rest the pointer on a shape and speak. Be somewhere else when it says “there”.

Fig. 56 — That

000 readings · idle

Anatomy of That

  1. 01Speak
    You
    Starts the sentence.
    It
    Listens for the words that need a hand.
  2. 02Bind
    You
    Points as each “that” or “there” is said.
    It
    Ties the word to wherever the hand is, at that instant.
  3. 03Miss
    You
    Points at nothing.
    It
    Can't resolve “that”, and says so instead of guessing.
  4. 04Act
    You
    Finishes speaking.
    It
    Carries out the whole sentence at once.

Phases light as the specimen above registers them. The dark ones are the ones it can't sense.

Lineage

Richard Bolt's "Put-That-There" (MIT Architecture Machine Group, 1980) sat a person before a wall-sized display, pointing and speaking; the system resolved each "that" and "there" to wherever the hand was aimed as the word was said.

Descends from
That
Gave rise to

Under delegation

Survives

  1. Survives
  2. Mutates
  3. Dissolves

Models made the speech half easy and cameras made the pointing half cheap, so the act Bolt staged in 1980 is ordinary now: circle a thing on the screen and ask about it. The hard part is still timing. A word like "that" is only as good as the machine's sense of what your hand meant, and when.

Becomes

Down the Point column

  1. it followsPoPoint
  2. it targetsPkPick
  3. it remembersSeSelect
  4. it connectsMeMention
  5. it guessesThThat
  6. it actsPuPoint out

Read down and Point gets heavier: each step is the same act, on a machine that keeps track of more.

Bodies

The act stays put while the hardware changes. These are some of the forms That takes.

  • point-and-speak
  • circle it