Virtual Keyboard

Archfeld sent a strange piece of technology called the Senseboard which is a portable keyboard, except that there's really not any keys. Or a board. And it can communicate via RF for all your strange wearable applications.

Comments

Re:musical applications?

[Van Halen]

Oh lovely. This is a new one - apparently slashdot substituted someone else's entire comment instead of mine, even though it looked fine in preview. I'll try once more before giving up. Here is my original comment:

It's already been done.

Re:Vaporous... Very, Very Vaporous

[Anonymous Coward]

You can visit them at Comdex:

Events
Visit us at COMDEX Fall 2001 in Las Vegas, November 12-16

A SenseboardTM prototype will be exhibited at COMDEX, Booth L2539, the Swedish Pavilion (Floor Map PDF-format)

Senseboard: sounds good but works poorly

[Eutope]

I saw the virtual keyboard on the comdex floor. It sounds like a great concept, but did not appear to function with a high degree of speed and accuracy. THe basic concept is interesting -- using neural networks to correlate the electrical signals from muscle movements with corresponding strokes on a keyboard, but more work needs to be done on the algorithms. The 2-man team behind the board is hoping to develop a product by march that could be used by anyone without training. But in the demo, only one person on the development team was able to use the keyboard, which seems to indicate that it will be more difficult to create a system that will work for a large population of users without training. That said it is an interesting concept that needs more work, and will probably require each user to train the keyboard for their movements, much like people do with continuous speech recognition programs today.

I don't mean to be funny but...

[rcs1000]

Isn't this an obvious hoax.

There is no way the image shown can tell when I press a key, or indeed where my fingers are with any degree of accuracy.

I spent two years playing with human-computer interfaces and quickly came to the conclusion that short of something physical to 'press' then users wouldn't know where keys where, and sensors (particularly placed where the 'knucklebands' shows are) wouldn't know with any degree of accuracy where my fingers were.

The lack of an AVI or any kind of press review just adds to my scepticism.

*r

Re:Cool, but...

[AlecC]

Way back when, my company made a product for use in an operating theatre by surgeons in mid operation. So it had to be usable with bloody gloves and capable of tolerating aggressive cleaning. It was hard plastic, with no feel at all. It ws absolutely horrible to use. It could be used as the system keyboard, but everybody needing to do more then about 10 keystrokes would unplug it and use a decent keyboard.