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"  (Diagram courtesy Wikipedia. Shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.)   Football fans are the sports world&amp;#039;s ultimate know-it-alls-from Tom Brady&amp;#039;s completion percentage to Plaxico Burress&amp;#039; 40-yard-dash time, it&amp;#039;s all about number crunching. And they might not know too much about Dr. Leonard Reiffel, but they sure know his work. The 80-year-old inventor is the brains behind the telestrator, that digital doodler and staple of sports commentating booths everywhere. On the eve of Super Bowl XLII, he sat down with PM to talk about artistic weathermen, the evolution of touchscreen technology and why John Madden&amp;#039;s job is a lot tougher than it looks. -Davin Coburn   Sunday is the Super Bowl, and we wanted to speak with you because sports fans everywhere know your work, even though they may not know a whole lot about you. And that is, of course, that you are the backup quarterback for the New England Patriots. [Laughs] Right.   No, of course you are the inventor of the telestrator. And I was curious, do you still get excited when you see someone like Troy Aikman play with your machine? Oh, absolutely. Every once and a while we&amp;#039;re sitting around, maybe in a bar, and up comes those tell-tale lines.   Can you walk us through how the telestrator works?  Well, originally what I developed was a transparent sensing plate that would allow you to read the position of a stylus, which the user used on that transparent plate. These days, of course, with the pads and all the stuff that&amp;#039;s come in succeeding decades, that&amp;#039;s no big thing. But there were no such things in that time. So if you have a transparent plate, you could put it over an image or anything else and have some way of recording how you&amp;#039;re moving the stylus. That was the basic problem, and we solved that with the methods that we used.   And where did this idea come from in the first place? I used to do a good deal of broadcasting and writing for science matters. I was a CBS science commentator on radio for a lot of years. But it all started with an educational channel here in Chicago where they asked me to do some science stuff. And I got tired-in those days you had very little budget-of just having a few pictures and having to do voiceovers: &amp;quot;If you look in the upper left hand corner, you&amp;#039;ll see X,Y, Z.&amp;quot; So I decided it would be very nice to be able to get my hands in the picture and draw on it.   And now telestrators show up on everything from sporting events to Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader. Did you expect this to be as popular as it has been? Well, I certainly foresaw its use in sports and weather, and I thought it might be useful in teaching. Some of the uses are amusing and surprising.   How did the sports world get a hold of it in the first place? What we did was approach CBS here in Chicago, the local station, after I had been using it on the educational channel for these science and technology kid programs I had been doing. And we suggested to them that they ought to try it out for sports. After that, a sportscaster and, previous to that, well-known Bears football player, Johnny Morris, was working on that aspect of it, as was the weatherman. John had started to use it significantly on that Chicago channel, and Johnny picked it up and we began to use it on football. After that, New York began to hear about it, and it went on from there.   Once New York gets a hold of something, that&amp;#039;s pretty much the end of that story. Where do you see this technology going in the future? I&amp;#039;m curious what your thoughts are on this current touchscreen revolution we seem to be going through. Well, it&amp;#039;s clearly all over the place, and I do believe that there are going to be touch-sensitive and even more sophisticated ways for humans to interact not just with images, but also with the outside world in general. In fact, I myself have been hard at work on something called attentive environments for some years now, and one of these days you&amp;#039;re likely to hear about that. For instance, when you wave your hand in mid-air and you&amp;#039;ve got a little code on your finger, that&amp;#039;s a part of the attentive environment. And your finger becomes a telestrator whenever you want it.   RELATED STORIES \u2022 PLUS: Complete Tech Coverage of Super Bowl XLII  \u2022 Q&amp;amp;amp;A: BCS Geek Explains Football Rankings   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a4694/4247541/>