If you ever wanted to read “A Game of Thrones,” odds are you were put off by the sheer number of pages each book in the series contains. For example, it is 819 pages worth of reading. Especially if you’re a slow reader, that doesn’t sound like a very fun number of pages. What if I told you that you could read the massive book in less than five hours? Spritz allows you to do just that.
In “Stealth Mode” for roughly three years, Spritz enables people to read words as they appear one at a time, in rapid succession. With Spritz, you can read anywhere from 250 to 1,000 words per minute.
Spritz allows you to start off at 250 words per minute:
Eventually, though, it’s time to cook with some gas at 350 wpm:
Finally, Spritz’s website currently allows users to go up to 500 wpm:
While rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), which is another way to speed up your reading, already exists, Spritz differs in that it focuses on the “Optimal Recognition Point,” or ORP. Notice the red letter whenever a word passes by? That’s the ORP, or “fixation point.”
Normally, when you read, your eyes hop from word to word, all the while figuring out the meaning of the word. Not only does this take time, but you only spend 20 percent of that reading time on processing whatever content you’re reading. The remaining 80 percent is used to go from word to word while looking for that fixation point, running the risk of skipping shorter words.
By indicating the ORP with red, and positioning each word so the location of the ORP doesn’t change, Spritz allows you to read and process the content while not having your eyes jump from word to word. This differs from RSVP, which simply shows you words in rapid succession without focusing on the ORP.
While Spritz’s software will make its way to the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Gear 2, Spritz wants its software to be in as many devices as possible. Its goal is to have 15 percent of the world’s textual content read through Spritz’s software by 2016.
