The BBC is trialing new technology which could help its audiences read the news faster than ever before.
Developed by Spritz, the technology presents information one word at a time and centred on the screen, a technique which perhaps counter-intuitively allows the reader to process it faster because their eyes stay fixed on a single area of the screen.
Potential uses of the technology include making news more accessible on smartwatches where screen space is severely limited and reading would otherwise require large amounts of page scrolling.
See the technology in action:
Cyrus Saihan, the BBC’s Head of Digital Partnerships, says: “The standard way of presenting and reading text is by putting text in horizontal lines and then moving your eyes across a page as you read each sentence from left to right.
“Each time that you read a word, your eyes look for a certain point within the word. After your eyes have found that point in the word, your brain starts to process and interpret the meaning of the word that you are looking at, before moving on to the next one.
“In our experiment, each word shown on screen has one letter that is highlighted red, to draw your attention to that point in the word.
“That letter is the optimal recognition point in the word and helps your brain quickly process the word, with as little eye movement as possible.”