This electrical energy is fed to a computer which produces output through an output device after necessary processing.
After capturing photos and videos on a digital camera, it can be connected to a computer, and the data can be stored for years. A picture in real life is easy to interpret. When a picture is transferred to the computer hard disk, it gets converted to binary or machine language.
Hence, a camera is an input device. Magnetic Ink Character Reader is the input device that is used to read the characters of MICR code that you generally see at the bottom of a cheque in which it consists of the check number, account number, and bank routing code.
MICR code is printed with a special type of magnetic ink that is understandable to the reading device. The reading input device extracts the characters and transfers them to the computer, which then does the necessary processing.
Gamepad is the chief input device used in almost all video game consoles. These are handheld, compact and multifunctional devices, which are operated mainly by thumbs. Gamepads are similar to joysticks and are designed to provide the user with a next-level gaming experience. A lot of devices are operated by an interactive touch screen.
For example, mobile phones, tablets, laptops, televisions, etc. Touch screens, undoubtedly, are input devices as they translate the user-provided commands into a computer-oriented language.
A touchpad serves to be a replacement for a computer mouse. It is usually embedded alongside the keyboard and is operated by a rolling finger over its surface. The concept of a computer mouse has its roots in the trackball, a related pointing device invented in that used a "roller ball" to control a pointer. Most modern computer mice have two buttons for clicking and a wheel in the middle for scrolling up and down documents and web pages. Also known as a trackpad, a touchpad is a common substitute for a computer mouse.
It is essentially a specialized surface that can detect the movement of a user's finger and use that information to direct a pointer and control a computer. Touchpads were first introduced for laptops in the s, and it's now rare to find a laptop without one. The word "scanner" can be used in a number of different ways in the computer world, but here I am using it to refer to a desktop image scanner.
Essentially, a scanner is an input device that uses optical technology to transfer images or sometimes text into a computer, where the signal is converted into a digital image. The digital image can then be viewed on a monitor screen, saved, edited, emailed, or printed.
Digital cameras are used to capture photographs and videos independently. Later, these photo and video files can be transferred to a computer by connecting the camera directly with a cable, removing the memory card and slotting it into the computer, or through wireless data transfer methods such as Bluetooth.
Once the photos are on the computer, they can be saved, edited, emailed, or printed. Microphones are input devices that allow users to record, save, and transmit audio using a computer. CoWomen via Unsplash. A microphone captures audio and sends it to a computer where it is converted to a digital format. Once the audio has been digitized, it can be played back, copied, edited, uploaded, or emailed.
Microphones can also be used to record audio or to relay sounds live as part of a video chat or audio stream. Joysticks are commonly used to control characters and vehicles in computer video games. Essentially, a joystick is a handle that pivots on a base and sends its angle or direction to the computer as data. Many video gaming joysticks feature triggers and buttons that can be pressed to use weapons or projectiles in games.
Also known as digitizers, graphic tablets are input devices used for converting hand-drawn artwork into digital images. The user draws with a stylus on a special flat surface as if they were drawing on a piece of paper. The drawing appears on the computer screen and can be saved, edited, or printed. Palo Alto, Calif. McNeely, and Ford Buttolo et al. These are the first signs of a new and broad-based high-technology industry with great potential for U. Research as discussed below is necessary to foster and accelerate the development of these and other emerging areas into full-fledged industries.
A number of science and technology issues arise in the haptics and tactile display arena. Haptics is attracting the attention of a growing number of researchers because of the many fascinating problems that must be solved to realize the vision of a rich set of haptic-enabled applications. Because haptic interaction intimately involves high-performance computing, advanced mechanical engineering, and human psychophysics and biomechanics, there are pressing needs for interdisciplinary collaborations as well as basic disciplinary advances.
These key areas include the following:. Better understanding of the biomechanics of human interaction with haptic displays. For example, stability of the haptic interaction goes beyond the traditional control analysis to include simulated geometry and nonlinear time-varying properties of human biomechanics.
Although many ideas can be adapted from computer graphics, haptic devices require at least 1,Hz update rates and a latency of no more than 1 millisecond for stability and performance. Thus, the bar is raised for the definition of "real-time" performance for algorithms such as collision detection, shading, and dynamic multibody simulation.
Advanced design of mechanisms for haptic interactions. Real haptic interaction uses all of the degrees of freedom of the human hand and arm as many as 29; see above. To provide high-quality haptic interaction over many degrees of freedom will continuously create many research challenges in mechanism design, actuator design, and control over many years to come.
Some of the applications of haptics that are practical today may seem arcane and specialized. This was also true for the first applications of computer graphics in the s. Emerging applications today are the ones with the most urgent need for haptic interaction.
Below are some examples of what may become possible:. She must insert the needle by feel. Like all physicians trained before this year, her instructor learned the procedure on actual human patients. Now, she is using a haptic display device hidden inside a plastic model of the human back. The device simulates the distinct feel of each of these tissues as well as the hard bones that she must avoid with the needle.
After a few sessions with the simulator and a quantitative evaluation of her physical proficiency, she graduates to her first real patient with confidence and skill. He brings the complete engine compartment model up on the graphics screen and clicks the oil filter to link it to the six-axis haptic display device on his desk next to the workstation.
Holding the haptic device, he removes the oil filter, feeling collisions with nearby engine objects. He finds that the filter cannot be removed because coolant hoses block the way. The engine compartment is thus redesigned early in the design process, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. The first of these examples is technically possible today; the second is not.
There are critical computational and mechatronic challenges that will be crucial to successful implementation of ever-more realistic haptic interfaces. Because haptics is such a basic human interaction mode for so many activities, there is little doubt that, as the technology matures, new and unforeseen applications and a substantial new industry will develop to give people the ability to physically interact with computational models.
Once user interfaces are as responsive as musical instruments, for example, virtuosity is more achievable. The consumer will do more of the latter, of course. Better feedback continuously delivered appears to take less prediction.
Research is necessary now to provide the intellectual capital upon that such an industry can be based. Tactile displays can help add realism to multisensory virtual reality environments. For people who are blind, however, tactile displays are. For people who are deaf and blind and who cannot use auditory displays or synthetic speech, it is the principal display form.
Vibration has been used for adding realism to movies and virtual reality environments and also as a signaling technique for people with hearing impairments. It can be used for alarm clocks or doorbells, but is limited in the information it can present even when different frequencies are used for different signals. Vibration can also be used effectively in combination with other tactile displays to provide supplemental information. For example, vibratory information can be used in combination with Braille to indicate text that is highlighted, italicized, or underlined, or to indicate text that is a hyperlink on a hypertext page.
Vibrotactile displays provide a higher-bandwidth channel. With a vibrotactile display, small pins are vibrated up and down to stimulate tactile sensors. The tactile array is usually used in conjunction with a small handheld camera but can also be connected directly to a computer to provide a tactile image around a mouse or other pointing device on the screen.
Electrocutaneous displays have also been explored as a way to create solid-state tactile arrays. Arrays have been constructed for use on the abdomen, back, forearm, and, most recently, the fingertip. Resolution for these displays is much lower than for vibrotactile displays.
Raised-line drawings have long been "king of the hill" for displaying of tactile information. The principal problem has been an inexpensive and fast way to generate them "on the fly. For lower resolution, there is a paper onto which one can photocopy and then process with heat, to cause it to swell wherever there are black lines although at a much lower resolution.
Printers that create embossed Braille pages can also be programmed to create tactile images that consist of raised dots. The resolution of these is lower still the best having a resolution of about 12 dots per inch , but the raised-dot form of the graphics actually has some advantages for tactile perception.
Braille is a system for representing alphanumeric characters tactiley. The system consists of six dots in a two wide by three high pattern. Braille is most commonly thought of as being printed or embossed, where paper is punched upward to form Braille cells or characters as raised dots on the page. A few cell displays have been developed, but they are quite expensive and large. By raising or lowering the pins, a line of Braille can be dynamically changed, rather like a single line of text. Virtual Page Displays.
Because of the difficulties creating full-page tactile displays, a number of people have tried techniques to create a "virtual" full-page display. One example was the Systems 3 prototype, where an Optacon tactile array was placed on a mouse-like puck on a graphics tablet.
As the person moved the puck around on the tablet, he or she felt a vibrating image of the screen that corresponded to that location on the tablet. The same technique has been tried with a dynamic Braille display. The resolution, of course, is much lower. In neither case did the tactile recognition approach that of raised lines. Full-Page Displays. Some attempts have been made to create full-page Braille-resolution displays.
The greatest difficulty has been in trying to create something with that many moving parts that is still reliable and inexpensive. More recently, some interesting strategies using ferro-electric liquids and other materials have been tried. In each case the objective was to create a system that involves the minimum number of moving parts and yet provides a very high-resolution tactile display.
Ideal Displays. A dream of the blindness community has been the development of a large plate of hard material that would provide a high-resolution solid-state tactile display. It would be addressable like a liquid-crystal display, with instant response, very high resolution, and variable height. It would be low cost, lightweight, and rugged. Finally, it would be best if it could easily track the position of fingers on the display, so that the tactile display could be easily coupled with voice and other audio to allow parallel presentation of tactile and auditory information for the area of the display currently being touched.
An even better solution, both for blind people and for virtual reality applications, would be a glove that somehow provided both full tactile sensation over the palm and fingertips and force feedback. Elements of this have been demonstrated, but nothing approaching full tactile sensation or any free-field force feedback. Filling out the range of technologies for people to communicate with systems-filling in the research and development gaps in the preceding.
Integration of these technologies into systems that use multiple communications modalities simultaneously-multimodal systems-can improve people's performance. These ideas are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.
Virtual reality involves the integration of multiple input and output technologies into an immersive experience that, ideally, will permit people to interact with systems as naturally as they do with real-world places and objects. People effortlessly integrate information gathered across modalities during conversational interactions.
Facial cues and gestures are combined with speech and situational cues, such as objects and events in the environment, to communicate meaning. Almost years of research in experimental psychology attests to our remarkable abilities to bring all knowledge to bear during human communication. The ability to integrate information across modalities is essential for accurate and robust comprehension of language by machines and to enable machines to communicate effectively with people.
In noisy environments, when speech is difficult to understand, facial cues provide both redundant and complementary information that dramatically improves recognition performance over either modality alone.
To improve recognition in noisy environments, researchers must discover effective procedures to recognize and combine speech and facial cues. Similarly, textual information may be transmitted more effectively under some conditions by turning the text into natural-sounding speech, produced by an animated "talking head" with appropriate facial movements.
While a great deal of excellent research is being undertaken in the laboratory, research in this area has not yet reached the stage where commercial applications have appeared, and fundamental problems remain to be solved. In particular, basic research is needed into the science of understanding how humans use multiple modalities.
Standard mass-market products are still largely designed with single interfaces e. There are systems designed to work with keyboard or mouse, and some cross-modality efforts.
Usually, though, these multiple input systems are accomplished by having a second input technique simulate input on the first-for example, having the speech interface create simulated keystrokes or mouse clicks rather than having the systems designed from the beginning to accommodate alternate interface modalities. This approach is usually the result of companies that decide to add voice or pen support or other input technique support to their applications after it has been architected.
This generates both compatibility problems and very complicated user configuration and programming problems. A similar problem exists with media, materials, databases, or educational programs designed to be used in a visual-only presentation format. Companies and users run into problems when the materials need to be presented aurally.
For example, systems designed for visual viewing often need to be reengineered if the data are going to be presented over a phone-based information system. The area where the greatest cross-modality interface research has been carried out has been the disability access area. Strategies for creating audiovisual materials that also include time-synchronized text e. Interestingly, although closed captioning was added to television sets for people who are deaf, it is used much more in noisy bars, by people learning to read a new language, by children, and by people who have muted their television sets.
The captions are also useful for institutions wishing to index or search audiovisual files, and they allow "agent" software to comprehend and work with the audio materials. In the area of public information systems, such as public kiosks, interfaces are now being developed that are flexible enough to accommodate individuals with an extremely wide range of type, degree, and combination of disabilities.
These systems are set up so that the standard touchscreen interface supports variations that allow individuals with different disabilities to use them. Extremely wide variation in human sensory motor abilities can be accommodated without changing the user interface for people without disabilities. For example, by providing a "touch and hear" feature, a kiosk can be made usable by individuals who cannot read or by those who have low vision. Holding down a switch would cause the touchscreen to become inactive e.
However, any buttons or text that were touched would be read aloud to the user. Releasing the switch would reactivate the screen. A "touch and confirm" mode would allow individuals with moderate to severe physical disabilities to use the kiosk by having it accept only input that is. An option that provides a listing of the items e. The use of captions for audiovisual materials on kiosks can allow individuals who have hearing impairments to access a kiosk as well as anyone else trying to use a kiosk in a noisy mall.
Finally, by sending the information on the pop-up list out through the computer's Infrared Data Association IrDA port, it is possible for individuals who are completely paralyzed or deaf and blind to access and use a kiosk via their personal assistive technologies. All of these features can be added to a standard multimedia touchscreen kiosk without adding any hardware beyond a single switch and without altering the interface experienced by individuals who do not have disabilities.
By adding interface enhancements such as these, it is possible to create a single public kiosk that looks and operates like any traditional touchscreen kiosk but is also accessible and usable by individuals who cannot read, who have low vision, who are blind, who are hearing impaired, who are deaf, who have physical disabilities, who are paralyzed, or who are deaf and blind.
Kiosks with flexible user-configurable interfaces have been distributed in Minnesota including the Mall of America , Washington State, and other states.
These and similar techniques have been implemented in other environments as well. Since the s, Apple Computer has had options built into its human interface to make it more useful to people with functional limitations look in any Macintosh control panel for Easy Access. Windows 95 has over a dozen adjustments and variations built into its human interface to allow it to be used by individuals with a very wide range of disabilities or environmental limitations, including those with difficulty hearing, seeing, physically operating a keyboard, and operating a mouse from the keyboard.
As we move into more immersive environments and environments that are utilizing a greater percentage of an individual's different sensory and motor systems simultaneously e. In the techniques developed to date, however, building interfaces that allow for cross-modality interaction have generally made for more robust and flexible interfaces and systems that can better adapt to new interface technologies as they emerge e.
The past 10 years has brought nearly a complete changeover from command line to WIMP interfaces as the dominant every-citizen's connection to computation. This happened because hardware memory, display chips became cheap enough to be engineered into every product. However, the NII implies a complex of technologies relevant to far more than office work, which is a practical reason not to expect it to be accessed by every citizen with mice and windows interfaces alone van Dam, The virtual shopping mall or museum is the next likely application metaphor; the parking lots will be unneeded, of course, as will attention to the laws of physics when inappropriate, but as in three-dimensional user interfaces generally, the metaphor can help in teaching users how to operate in a synthetic environment.
Such a metaphor helps also to avoid the constraints that may derive from metaphors linked to one class of activity e. At SIGGRAPH 96, the major conference for computer graphics and interactive techniques, full-quality, real-time, interactive, three-dimensional, textured flight simulation was presented as the next desirable feature in every product.
Visual representations of users, known as avatars, are one trend that has been recognized in the popular press. Typing is not usually required or desirable. The world portrayed is spatially three dimensional and it continues way beyond the boundaries of the display device.
In this context, input and output devices with more than 2 degrees of freedom are being developed to support true direct manipulation of objects, as opposed to the indirect control provided by two- and three-dimensional widgets, and user interfaces appear to require support for many degrees of freedom, 21 higher-bandwidth input and output, real-time response, continuous response and feedback, probabalistic input, and multiple simultaneous input and output streams from multiple users Herndon et al.
Note that virtual reality also expands on the challenges posed by speech synthesis to include synthesis of arbitrary sounds, a problem. Economic factors will pace the broader accessibility of technologies that are currently priced out of the reach of every citizen, such as high-end virtual reality. Virtual reality technology, deriving from 30 years of government and industry funding, will see its cost plummet as development is amortized over millions of chip sets, allowing it to come into the mainstream.
Initially, the software for these new chips will be crafted and optimized by legions of video game programmers driven by teenage mass-market consumption of the best play and graphics attainable.
Coupled with the development of relatively cheap wide-angle immersive displays and hundredfold increases in computing power, personal access to data will come through navigation of complex artificial spaces.
However, providing the every-citizen interface to this shared information infrastructure will need some help on the design front. Very little cognitive neuroscience and perceptual physiology is understood, much less applied, by human interface developers. The Decade of the Brain is well into its second half now; a flood of information will be available to alert practitioners in the computing community that will be of great use in designing the every-citizen interface.
Teams of sensory psychologists, industrial designers, electrical engineers, computer scientists, and marketing experts need to explore, together, the needs of governance, commerce, education, and entertainment. The neuroplasticity of children's cognitive development when they are computationally immersed early in life is barely acknowledged, much less understood.
Enumerate and prioritize human capabilities to modulate energy. This requires a comprehensive compilation of published bioengineering and medical research on human performance measurement techniques, filtering for the instrumentation modalities that the human subjects can use to willfully generate continuous or binary output.
Note that much is known about human input capacity, by contrast. Develop navigational techniques, etc. This is akin to understanding the functional transitions in moving around in the WIMP desktop metaphor and is critical to nontrivial exploitation of the shopping mall metaphor of VR.
Note that directional surround-sound. Schematic means need to be developed to display the shopping mall metaphor on conventional desktop computers, small video projectors, and embedded displays. Both software and hardware need to be provided in a form that allows ''plug and play. Despite the easily available technology in chip form, it is still clumsy if not impossible for an ordinary user to make and edit a video recording to document a computer session, unless it is a video game! Imagine text editing if you could only cut and paste but never store the results.
Connect to remote computations and data sources. This is inevitable and will be driven by every sector of computing and Web usage. Understand the computer as an instrument. This is inevitable and will be market-driven as customers become more exposed to good interfaces. Note that the competition between Web browser companies is not about megahertz and memory size! Create audio output matched to the dynamic range of human hearing.
Digital sound synthesis is in its infancy. Given the speed of currently available high-end microprocessors, this is almost entirely a software tools problem from the engineering side and a training problem from the creative side.
Note that flawless voice recognition is left out here! Controversial: because they seem to be developing for a postliterate society whose members will no longer!
Eliminate typing as a required input technique. Many computer. Related: provide for typing when necessary in walk-around situations such as VR or warehouse data entry. Possible solutions are wearable chord keyboards, voice recognition, and gesture recognition. Issues include whether training will be essential, ranging from the effort needed to learn a video game or new word processor to that required to play a musical instrument or to drive a bulldozer. Reduce reliance on reading.
Road signs have been highly developed and standardized to reduce the reliance on reading for navigation in the real world. The controversy here may stem from the copyright if not patent protection asserted by commercial developers on each new wrinkle of look and feel on computer screens.
A fine role for government here is to encourage public domain development of the symbolism needed to navigate complex multidimensional spaces.
Develop haptic devices. Safe force-feedback devices capable of delivering fine touch sensations under computer control are still largely a dream. Keyboards and mice injure without the help of force feedback; devices capable of providing substantial feedback could do real injury. Some heavy earth-moving equipment designs are now "fly-by-wire"; force feedback is being simulated to give the operator the feel once transmitted by mechanical linkage.
The barriers are providing fail-safe mechanisms, finding the applications warranting force feedback, and providing the software and hardware that are up to the task.
LCD screen sizes and resolutions seem to be driven by market needs for laptop computers. Twenty-twenty vision is roughly 5, pixels at a 90 degree angle of view ; less is needed at the angle people normally view television or workstation screens, more for wide-angle VR applications.
A magazine advertisement is typically equivalent to 8, pixels across, on average, which is what a mature industry provides and is paid for, a suggested benchmark for the next decade or so. More resolution can be used to facilitate simple panning which is what a person does when reading the Wall Street Journal , for example or zooming in as a person does when looking closely at a real item with a magnifying glass , both of which can be digitally realized with processing and.
Certain quality enhancements may be achieved with higher refresh rates e. Low latency, not currently a feature of LCD displays, is needed for Hz or greater devices. Micromirror projectors show promise in this area. Multiple projectors tiled together may achieve such an effect Woodward, where warranted; monitors and LCD screens do not lend themselves to tiling because the borders around the individual displays do not allow seamless configurations.
Truly borderless flat displays are clearly desirable as a way to build truly high-resolution displays. Providing enough computer for the ECI.
This is probably the least of the problems because the microprocessor industry, having nearly achieved the capability of vintage Crays in single chips, is now ganging them together by fours and eights into packages. Gigaflop personal computers are close; teraflop desktop units are clearly on the horizon as massive parallelism becomes understood. Taking advantage of all this power is the challenge and will drive the cost down through mass production as the interfaces make the power accessible and desirable.
More futuristic goals such as the petaflop computer and biological "computing" will likely happen in our lifetimes. Providing adequate network bandwidth to the end user. Some of the challenges in network infrastructure are discussed in the next section "The Communications Infrastructure". With respect to VR specifically, current data transfer rates between disk drives and screens are not up to the task of playing back full-screen movies uncompressed.
The state of the art for national backbone and regional networking is megabits per second. The goal of providing adequate bandwidth depends on the definition of "adequate" and how much computing is used to compress and decompress information. Fiber optics is capable of tremendous information transmission; it is the switches which are computers that govern the speeds and capacity now.
Assuming that network bandwidth will be provided as demand increases, it seems likely that within 10 years a significant fraction of the population will be able to afford truly extraordinary bandwidth CSTB, Because ECIs must work in a networked environment, interface design involves choices that depend on the performance of network access and network-based services and features.
What ramifications does connection to networks have for ECIs? This question is relevant because a user interface for any networked application is much more than the immediate set of controls, transducers, and displays that face the user. It is the entire experience that the user has, including the following:. Response time-how close to immediate response from an information site or setup of a communications connection;.
Media quality of audio, video, images, computer-generated environments , including delay for real-time communications and being able to send as well as receive with acceptable quality;. Ability to control media quality and trade-off between applications and against cost;.
Transparent mobility anytime, anywhere of terminals, services, and applications over time;. Portable "plug and play" of devices such as cable television set-top boxes and wireless devices;. Integrity and reliability of nomadic computing and communications despite temporary outages and changes in available access bandwidth;. Consistency of service interfaces in different locations not restricted to the United States ; and. The feeling the user has of navigating in a logically configured, consistent, extensible space of information objects and services.
To understand how networking affects user interfaces, consider the two most common interface paradigms for networked applications: speech telephony and the "point and click" Web browser. These are so widely accepted and accessible to all kinds of people that they can already be regarded as "almost" every-citizen user interfaces. Research to extend the functionality and performance of these interfaces, without complicating their most common applications, would further NII accessibility for ordinary people.
Speech, understood here to describe information exchange with other people and machines more than an immediate interface with a device, is a. It is remarkably robust under varying conditions, including a wide range of communications facilities.
The rise of Internet telephony and other voice and video-oriented Internet services reinforces the impression that voice will always be a leading paradigm. Voice also illustrates that the difference between a curiosity such as today's Internet telephony and a widely used and expected service depends significantly on performance: 22 Technological advances in the Internet, such as IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 and routers with quality-of-service features, together with increased capacity and better management of the performance of Internet facilities, are likely to result in much better performance for voice-based applications in the early twenty-first century.
The "point and click" Web browser reflects basic human behavior, apparent in any child in a toy store who points to something and says click! For reaching information and people, a Web browser is actually far more standard than telephony, which has different dial tones and service measurement systems in different countries. Research issues include multimedia extensions including clicking with a spoken "I want that" , adaptation to the increasing skill of a user in features such as multiple windows and navigation speed, and adapting to a variety of devices and communication resources that will offer more or less processing power and communications performance.
Among the elements of communications infrastructure that affect performance, the access network is one among several network elements including networking in the local area of the user and networking within the public network that have considerable influence on performance. Access network bandwidth is an important parameter affecting performance. Physical communications networking can be categorized as an interworking of three networking levels: local, access, and core or "wide area".
Almost any network-based activity of a residential user is likely to use all three. Local area networks LANs are on the end-user's premises, such as a house, apartment or office building, or university campus. Ethernet, the most widely deployed LAN technology, is already appearing in homes for computer access to cable-based data access systems such as TimeWarner's RoadRunner, Com21's access system, and Home's access system.
It could be in millions of American homes by the year In general, the megabit-per-second Mbps Ethernet is the favored communications interface for connecting personal computers and computing devices to set-top boxes and other network interface devices being developed for high-speed subscriber access networks.
A properly engineered shared-bandwidth architecture such as Ethernet allows multiple devices to have the high "burst rate" capability needed for good performance, such as fast transfer of an image, with only rare degradation from congestion. It is "alwasy on," allowing devices always to be connected and ready to satisfy user needs immediately, as opposed to a tedious connection setup. The introduction of IPv6 in the next decade will create an extremely large pool of Internet addresses, allowing each human being in the world to own hundreds or thousands of them.
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