Rapid Serial Visual Presentation

This is quite a cool solution to the problem of reading a lot of text on small displays like cellphones or PDAs. The idea is that the text is shown one word at a time, with each word replacing the previous word, so your display really only needs to be one word big. It's described in a Mobile Magazine article by Mark Frauenfelder, and there's an online demo.

I thought it would be really disconcerting, and for the first couple of seconds it is - you're consciously reading the word out loud in your head (if you know what I mean), and trying to remember the context. But pretty soon you get used to it, although after a little bit more my eyes got really tired - you don't need to move your eyes across a page, but somehow they jump around a lot, as though you're so used to moving your eyes that you do it whether you need to or not.

The demo only uses short quotes, unfortunately - I'd like to see how well it works with a longer piece of text that you need to remember more context for - just something simple like a blog entry, and then for something more complicated. I suspect that comprehension might decrease in those kind of situations. Of course, I'm just guessing; they are putting a lot of research into in (links are in the article mentioned above).

But wouldn't it be cool to be able to easily read text on a pda or cellphone?