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Piggybacking on this subject, does anyone have a favorite alternative keyboard? Has anyone actually used the FrogPad, AlphaGrip, or the OrbiTouch?

http://www.keybowl.com/ You could also try the Frogpad but I don't know how ergo that is.

You mean something like this?

Seems to me that there have been a lot of attempts made to come up with better keyboard designs - Dvorak; that alphabetical keyboards; chordic keyboards; split keyboards; weird keyboards; other weird keyboards; and so on.

Call me when one of them has broad market acceptance.

Michael

Probably an Orbitouch user.

Check out: http://www.keybowl.com/kb/index?page=messages&msg= 192-168-1-9-309e87-f1e54d2e2a--7fec

Apparently you never get faster than 50-60% of your fastest typing speed on a regular keyboard. :-(

Having looked at the how it works section it becomes apparent that this is not the answer. Individual letters are "typed" by chord like movements of both hands. Some what akin to using two joysticks to type. This is neither easy nor intuitive. And that is the biggest sticking point.

Input devices such as keyboards and mice need to be intuitive and easy to use. Keyboards are very intuitive, a panel full of labeled buttons is presented. Pressing one of the buttons prints the label on the screen. Even very young children have no problem figuring out how to use a keyboard. Indeed the only thing you need to "learn" about using a keyboard is the actual key placement as a QWERTY is not intuitive key placement for the uninitiated. Just watch a five year old at the keyboard and you will know what I mean. Then imagine th same five year old trying to figure out the OrbiTouch.

I'm afraid to say that we cannot expect further advancement beyond the regular keyboard. It has been advanced to the fullest useful level possible. To get to the next level a totally different input device will be required, not a keyboard at all. The last such step that we have seen in input devices was the mouse, now >30 years old. The next step in input devices will be either voice recognition or some form of direct mind-to-pc interface. Right now, voice recognition seems to be the closest to reallity but, given its imaturity, it is still a few years off.

I recently found the Orbitouch keyboard which looks like a giant leap forward - basically a pair of paddles that can move to one of 8 'compass points', giving you 256 key combinations, plus a mouse built into the right paddle. I haven't got to try one out yet but I think it looks like the right step away from the finger-wiggling which we're really not designed for...

Has anyone tried the Orbitouch? I'd be interested in hearing some feedback.

I have studied the problem specially (for desktop though) and I see no good method of text input at all.

Firstly, forget about direct neural interface and speech input. The neural interface is terribly slow, the speech input cannot deal with programming language texts.

Then, forget about a stylus and touchscreen. Stylus is simply too slow, touchscreen will cover your screen with grease from your hands.

There is a nice product that looks promising - Alphagrip - but AFAIK it's still not in production, and I fear it has a lot of other problems, for instance, I cannot imagine how it can be used as a game device as claimed by inventors, or how the index finger can press UP.

Datahand looks the best and is ergonomic enough but is simply too big to fit in a laptop.Twiddler IMHO requires too non-ergonomic fingers movement severely limiting the input speed.

The following methods look promising:
Keybowl that can be emulated with a pair of analog joysticks taken from Sony PS Doubleshock joysticks,
Wlonk - a 10-key macroprogrammable chording keyboard (You should design the mouse, driver and formfactor yourself),
and variations of TheBAT, DataEgg, 7KEY a.s.o (7-key 1-hand chording keyboard. Are you going to study the chords?)

Remove all SPAM from my email to answer.

The Qwerty keyboard layout was designed in 1872. The Dvorak keyboard layout was designed in 1932. Since then, many people have sat around and argued which is better. But it's not clear that either one is truly the best.

I think they are both pretty good. But I'm confident that today we can do better. And this is a project that I've just started to look into.

I'm currently an SDE, but most of my graduate work was in theory. There are two reasons why I think we can do better today:

A) We have developed many algorithms that can solve or closely approximate hard optimization problems.

B) We have computers.


I've broken the problem of determining a good keyboard layout into the following steps:

1) Determine what people actually type. I'm not quite sure how to best do this. Ideally, everyone would send me a file which captured the key strokes that they've made over the past decade. Realistically, I was thinking of simply gathering data from the web, and using word frequency data.

2) Determine how to effectively model typing. There are some interesting experiments that show that, for example, your index finger is faster and stronger than your pinky. Also, you can type more efficiently if the keys you need to type alternate hands. Here are some interesting reports on typing micro-benchmarks and such. The goal of this model would be to tell you how efficient a particular keyboard layout is. Until I read otherwise, I'm assuming that maximizing efficiency also maximizes ergonomics.

3) Develop an algorithm. This is the fun part. Develop an alorithm which searches the very large search space of possible keyboard layouts and find one which is as close to optimal as possible as defined by the efficiency of the model. I may find that this optimization problem is best expressed at a semidefinite program, or such, but it will be interesting to see where the model takes me.

4) Real world test. I have no illusions of gradeur. I don't expect people to come rushing to try out the keyboard layout I design. But I'm hoping that I can convince a few people to try it out and give it a test drive.


I would like to post this as an "ask slashdot" after I make more progress and can give more specifics, but does anyone have some good suggestions at this point? I'm especially interested in information concerning (1) and (2). Can anyone point me to other keyboard research?


BTW, I currently have two Kinesis Ergo keyboards (one for work and one for home) which can switch between qwerty and dvorak. I highly recommend them. There are many reasons I prefer them over a normal keyboard, but the biggest reason is the thumb keys. When the standard computer keyboard was designed, they just took the qwerty keyboard layout and added function keys around the edges. Thus, on a standard keyboard, the pinky (the weakest finger) is completely overworked while the thumbs (the stongest "finger") hardly break a sweat.

If you're looking for a fully gesture-based input system, you may be interested in the KeyBowl, a no-key no-wrist-movement "keyboard". Contrary to what the pictures might imply, the two domes don't rotate. Rather, letters are formed by sliding the domes while keeping the wrists straight.

I don't own one of these (I have a Kinesis Contoured keyboard, which I'm very pleased with), but I'd be half-tempted to buy a KeyBowl if they weren't almost $400 (%$#!).

Alex Bischoff
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If you're looking for a fully gesture-based input system, you may be interested in the KeyBowl, a no-key no-wrist-movement "keyboard". Contrary to what the pictures might imply, the two domes don't rotate. Rather, letters are formed by sliding the domes while keeping the wrists straight.

I don't own one of these (I have a Kinesis Contoured keyboard, which I'm very pleased with), but I'd be half-tempted to buy a KeyBowl if they weren't almost $400 (%$#!).

Alex Bischoff
---

If you're looking for a fully gesture-based input system, you may be interested in the KeyBowl, a no-key no-wrist-movement "keyboard". Contrary to what the pictures might imply, the two domes don't rotate. Rather, letters are formed by sliding the domes while keeping the wrists straight.

I don't own one of these (I have a Kinesis Contoured keyboard, which I'm very pleased with), but I'd be half-tempted to buy a KeyBowl if they weren't almost $400 (%$#!).

Alex Bischoff
---