131–140 of 216 posts
Wow. I found "reading" their demo a deeply unpleasant experience. It seemed to induce tunnel vision, and put a huge amount of strain on my lenses. The dark background of the page surrounding the banner didn't help, and persisted in my vision for a good 5 minutes. My eyes still hurt.
This is very interesting (and as has been pointed out in other comments, not exactly a new idea). I think its proper application, though, is in a tool for practicing reading, not for actually reading tests. One major thing this approach looses is the inherent non-linearity of text. If I miss a fact and want to back up a bit, or want to pause for a moment and think about something, I can (when reading) without even th…
That said, I don't see it as being a blocker exactly. A UI that let you pause the stream, and then if asked revealed some kind of tome navigation can't be too difficult to do. Also, images (photos, diagrams) could be revealed in a similar way.
That way the benefit of speed reading is retained, but with the added benefit of being able to skip backwards and forwards, and pausing to look at graphics.
If I am reading for pleasure I am reading slowly, savoring each word and I want to go at a variable speed say 300-600wpm.
If I am reading something where each word is not important, then I am scanning, reading a line at a time and getting 1000+wpm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spreeder shows one word at a time, right? As someone who speed-reads regularly, I find that reading three words at a time works much better than one word, especially w.r.t. retaining context. It also seems to matter whether chunks are split around punctuation or not, i.e. If the sentence is about to end after two words, the current chunk should not show the first word of the next sentence, just show the last two word…
I just bought a copy of Velocireader. I like it so far :) Is there any way to raise the speed above 900wpm without going all the way to 1200wpm? The book I'm reading now is fine at 900wpm (and +/- buttons at the top-right of the screen to make +5%/-5% adjustments to the speed without stopping reading would be great. I'll get back to reading...
Currently there isn't a way to do that without adjusting the number of words. I've had other users complain about this though, so in the next update I'm going to make the time slider free to move, and introduce a stepper to adjust to the nearest 50wpm or something. This update has taken a while because I've been working on Pocket/Instapaper support.
Originally the slider was free to move; it was just too finicky to get down to a round-figure WPM on the smaller devices so I added the 'ratchet'.
This is very interesting (and as has been pointed out in other comments, not exactly a new idea). I think its proper application, though, is in a tool for practicing reading, not for actually reading tests. One major thing this approach looses is the inherent non-linearity of text. If I miss a fact and want to back up a bit, or want to pause for a moment and think about something, I can (when reading) without even th…
This stuff always interests me because I'm a terribly slow reader (I think I did ~180 wpm on the above test). I'd really like to be able to improve without hurting my comprehension. However, when I discuss an article with someone who reads quickly I usually find that they've missed some important pieces of information. The sort of gaps exposed by real conversation may not show up on a simple multiple choice quiz. I'm just guessing here though. Based on my own experience, hearing that someone read 700wpm with 95% comprehension is like hearing that someone has broken the laws of physics.
I wonder whether this uses the front-facing camera for blink detection, particularly at higher WPM settings. A blink typically lasts 100-400ms (per Wikipedia), and 500 WPM is .8333... words per 100ms. A blink thus seems very likely to miss a word or two once you're using this the way its creators intend. I don't see any mention of blinking or mitigating its impact on the site, though.
Thank you for helping me figure out why my eyes started burning when I was spritzing. I think you subconsciously try to avoid blinking becuase you know you'll miss a word.