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4.3. DATAFLOW PROGRAMMING
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A designer of conversational graphic systems should be concerned with:
guaranteeing complete and efficient discourse, reducing the psychological distance by avoiding unnecessary trauma, improving the naturalness of the discourse by improving syntactic regularity on the action language (notably, sentence structuring and continuity); using the local equivalences among action
devices to exploit their psychological differences and choosing implementation
of action language constructs to suit the context. [26] (emphasis added by the
author)
The bottom line of the quotation above relies on the authors’ efforts of providing a discourse (corresponds to the previously named language and database) between the opponent
and unreflecting machine that should be as much natural to the human as possible. In
the following parts each distinct virtual device will be introduced shortly.
Valuator
A valuator is a one-dimensional value within the real vector space. For example, rotating a
potentiometer sends discrete values whereas the vector increases when rotating clockwise
and decreases when rotating counter-clockwise. A linear prototype would be a linear slider
component.
Locator
A locator reflects a unique position and orientation in a vector space. This can be a twodimensional vector in its primitive representation (e.g. a location of a cursor on a planar
display). Furthermore, multi-dimensional values are possible such as a 6DoF5 vector including x-, y-, and z-axis value plus the three rotational values pitch, yaw, and roll around
the 3d location.
Button
A button as a primitive device that can represent boolean states and the like. Values such
as true/false, 0/1, and on/off are potential values of a button device . The most popular
device equipped with button devices is the computer mouse. Several mouse buttons response to user input such as “press” or “release”.
Keyboard
A keyboard device is a sequence of ASCII characters. Each sequence can be terminated
by a particular character sequence such as the zero-byte in a null-terminated string. The
prototype of a keyboard device is the keyboard as input device. In addition, a modem can
provide a serial of characters too.
Pick
The device type “pick” developed by Victor L. Wallace (see Figure 4.5) cannot be projected yet onto the generic data type hierarchy due to the lack of unavailable element
references of visual components of the user interface. A possible solution on how such
visual object references can be projected onto the generic data types of Squidy will be
5
6 Degrees of Freedom including a vector in three-dimensional space (x, y, z) and rotation axis (pitch, yaw,
roll)