Overview
A soon-to-be-released app is promising a brand new superpower: reading at the speed of light. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it is posing some rather extraordinary possibilities – Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 77 minutes, War and Peace in ten hours and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (all 3 million words) in two days and twelve hours.
You might assume that Spritz, as it’s named, would deliver such miracles via watered-down, abridged versions of the classics. But that's not the case. The user still reads every single word — just at a much faster pace than most of us thought was possible.
But how? Rather than presenting books in the page-by-page format that we’ve come to accept as gospel, Spritz delivers them one word at a time. The average university student reads at a pace of about 200-400 words per minute, but with the app (and some practice), this can bump up to 500 or even 1,000.
Check it:
That was 250wpm. Think you can do 350wpm?
500wpm is below. If you're not dealing, look away for a while; you may find your brain adapts scary-fast.
Its success depends on the existence of an 'Optimal Recognition Point' (ORP), also known as a 'fixation point', which is found just to the left of the middle of any word. When we read, we unconsciously jump from one of these to another. So Spritz gives us a speed injection by highlighting ORPs in red. This trick differentiates the app from previous speed-reading tools that have utilised the one-word-at-a-time format, such as Velocity and Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP).
Spritz is bound for the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Samsung Gear 2 watch. It's been in development for three years and, now that it’s ready for take-off, its creators are looking for developers, technicians and database experts. If you’ve been looking for a reason to move to Utah, here’s your chance.
Via Huffington Post.