Comment by DonHopkins

You're proving exactly why I posted what I did. Nobody else has the time to watch a couple of 45 minute videos (several hours actually), so I took the time to do that myself (several more videos about Dasher than those, in fact), and summarize them for you.

I've had email discussions about Dasher with people I mentioned like Ada Majorek (Google), also David Ward (Inference, who worked with the late David MacKay), Tom Doellstorff (UC Irvine), Donna Z. Davis (University of Oregon), and I've read several papers about it, and also the open source code on github, to understand how it works. So I took the time to summarize the points in the videos, the email discussions I've had, the papers I read, and source code I reviewed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12310029

-Don

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Hi Don,

I will write more soon. I was swamped with work last week.

First, I am very happy to see your interest in Dasher. I don't have enough time to research another platform. I will be happy to give you walk through the code, and you can decide, if adding Unity is feasible. Is it possible to interface with C++ code on Uniy? There is Dasher Core. It is platform independent. And "all" you need to do is to extend several classes.

Implementing it in Java Script is an interesting idea. You are second person suggesting it. Again, I will not have time to do it. But would gladly answer any questions.

When you wrote about radial menus, I immediately thought of this prototype. Have you seen it before?

D@sher Prototype - An adaptive, hierarchical radial menu:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oSfEM8XpH4

I better send half of the email now, than full email never ;-)

Written with Dasher and Headmouse.

:-) Ada

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Thank you for your quick reply — I’m delighted to hear from you!

Yes, it’s possible to interface native C++ code with Unity.

It would also be possible to translate the C++ code to C#, which is a similar language (just cleaner and more modern).

It’s also possible to compile C++ into JavaScript, but that makes it considerably harder to integrate with normal JavaScript code, so it might also be worth considering translating the C++ code to JavaScript by hand, to make it more efficient and better integrated with the browser.

That adaptive hierarchical radial menu is wonderful! Thank you for linking me to that. I’ll contact the author and brainstorm ideas!

That reminds me of a weird experiment I tried years ago: Here is a “precision pie menu” that I made for the NeWS window system, which lets you precisely select an angle by poking out of the circle and precisely dialing in an exact number with a flexible floppy line. I’ve never used it for anything practical, but it was a fun experiment!

Precision Pie Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0scs59va4c

Experiments like that are useful vehicles for exploring possibilities and generating new ideas, even if they aren’t directly useful themselves. You just can’t get very far by doing though experiments alone — you need to play with a working prototype and actually feel how it works, in order to decide how to improve it or design something different.

It’s so cool you’re using Dasher and a Headmouse for everyday work, and that gives you so much experience and insight into how to use it best and make it better.

So please don’t hesitate to send me half emails and half baked ideas, even if you don’t have the time to finish them!

-Don

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Ada Majorek on Dasher:

[I reformatted her inspiring transcript, for people who don't have time to watch the three minute video, although it's well worth it to see how Dasher works.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvHQ83pMLQQ

ALS robbed me from ability to speak and ability to use computer keyboard.

Thanks to Dasher I am still able to communicate at reasonable speed.

Hi, my name is Ada. I want to talk about why I like Dasher. Since my ALS diagnosis in 2013 I tried countless number of alternative text entry and speech generation methods.

So far Dasher is the fastest and least tiring.

Dasher supports multiple languages. Very important for me, since I switch between English and Polish many times per day.

I really like geeky origin of Dasher.

It started as a visualization of arithmetic coding algorithm.

Unfortunately at the time Dasher was not actively maintained. I was a software engineer in desperate need for a fast alternative communication tool.

Dasher was an open-source project. I decided to start coding. With help of my friends and support of Google, we added many features making Dasher even better suited for alternative means of communication.

And here we are today after almost 6 years of silence we are releasing a new version of Dasher: Dasher 5.00.

If you know people with motor impairments or therapists, please let them know. They will like new features we have added. If you know programming, consider contributing to this very valuable project.

And last but not least, if you worked on Dasher in the past, thank you very much from the bottom of my heart.