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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.
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Cool, but I value tactile feedback. The lack of feeling of me actually *pushing* a button will just feel weird. I wonder if it's something you'd get over, though.
How cool would it be to play the piano on my desk? Someone may have figured out a way to make money on all of those people playing 'airguitar' everytime Led Zeppelin comes on the radio...
davejenkins.com |
The applications of this product are endless.
:) Itll up the usability and practicality of PDAs and wearable computers in real world situations.
Imagine if you were a mechanic under a car and needed to type up some sorta note or reminder into your computer.
No more grafiti for PDAS
Can't wait to get one.
Smells very strongly of Vapor.... No details, and bogus claims of "Artificial Intelligence".
We can't do AI on big-ass supercomputers, you expect me to believe these little wristpade have AI in them?
I'll believe it when I see a product on the shelf.
Great... if you can FULLY touch-type. What about the other 99.995% of us that can't?
Sure, I can type 80wpm without looking at the keyboard... until I need to use some weird character that I don't use 400 times a day...
I guess you could roll out a printed keyboard to use if you had to... I can just see someone carring around a dirty napkin with a keyboard scrawled on it now... q:]
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Friends and I have always thought something like this would be nifty---something like a virtual keyboard you could type in the air---although when I saw this announcement I wondered if it would actually be as practical from an HCI standpoint. After all, there's no real tactile feedback to tell you if you've hit the right "key," as far as I can tell. This sort of feedback is important, moreso than visual feedback (since unless you can't touchtype, you don't need to see the keyboard: try typing in the dark), especially to avert Repetitive Stress Injury.
On the other hand, just to test the concept, I tried "typing" on a flat surface, and it seemed fairly intuitive. This is probably better in this respace than an "air keyboard", since you at least feel the contact of the desk. (Assuming you can't type in the air with this product, although there doesn't seem to be a reason why not, they say "any flat surface".) Now what would be nifty is a roll-up guide you could "type" on to get both visual feedback and a soft touch. This would solve hunting and pecking problems, too. :-)
I'd really love to have one of these, since they seem to solve most portability problems, and since it seems you can tweak the virtual keyboard's size (layout, etc.), it'd make the ultimate evolution in keyboards. (No more need for a "flex" keyboard, just mold a surface...)
Nifty.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Well all of you complaining that you need the tactile feedback and the clicking noise generated by it.. well think about this.. its QUIET so that means you can use it during class ( if youre a student ) so you could have your palm and this and be able to take notes on your palm quietly and not bother anybody else ( granted you'll look a little silly and probably have a coupla more errors in your typing than usual ) but its a nice data input device that will be able to type anyplace.. Plane sound good? dont have enough room in your seat to type with a full sized keyboard so this will work quite nicely.. its also compact so its easy to lug around too..
So I dont think all this bitching is warranted, granted you're going to have to have a keyboard layout in your head to type accrately and get used to typing without visual cues.. and if this is all its supposed to be then it'll be a very cool and useful thing..
-dwd-
Well, just wait for the arthritis to set in and listen for your knuckles cracking....
This might be really cool for portable applications. Imagine how much thinner a laptop could be if there didn't need to be a keyboard. (Or a mouse for that matter--let's say they put a piece of plastic that doesn't get dirty against the display, and make that into a touch-screen. People like me would rarely use that anyway (mice suck, IMO).) Then get rid of the keyboard, making the laptop about 1/4 to 1/2 inches thinner. That would be totally awesome. Hey, why not get rid of the power button and put something like what the Apple Cube or whatever it was called--there was no button, just a place where you touch the case and the computer would turn on or off. There was even a light that gets brighter when your finger comes close to the thing. Maybe the "buttons" could be silk-screened onto a flat surface on the computer and all have lights behind them that get brighter as your finger gets closer. That would be like something out of Star Trek. And there would be far less mechanical components in the laptop, making it last longer. Hey, why not get rid of the mechanical hard drive and put a solid-state drive in there. Currently, such a drive will read at extremely high speeds (much faster than any mechanical drive) and write at speeds about as fast as a mechanical drive. (I read that in two or three months' ago Circuit Cellar, I think.) Each "page" on these drives wears out after 10,000 to 1 million writes, but normal hard drives wear out after a while too. The rule is the same: back up your data. Besides, some of the better drives out there will automatically distribute the write load around on the drive so that it will last longer and stuff. Well, back to the keyboard thing. Oh, I was talking about removing mechanical components. Imagine if you could take almost all mechanical components out of the laptop. (The only things I can think of that need to remain mechanical are the CD-ROM and floppy drives. And the speakers, perhaps, I guess those are mechanical.) So you'd end up with an ultra-quiet, ultra-light (and ultra-futuristic-cool) laptop that will probably last longer than what is currently used today. Oh well.
Reading through at +3, I see that most of the respondents have a pretty negative attitude towards this device. If it's real, then, wow...I mean, this is the sort of thing that webpads and the like need. Sure, a stylus is nice for most things, but if you need to write more than a little bit, you need a keyboard.
:)
What's more, I think, is that one of the big size-limiting factors of making laptops much smaller than they are is the need for a keyboard. Imagine if you had a webpad style laptop that had a built-in mechanism for propping it up, and you'd just strap on the virtual keyboard doohickeys and away you'd go. By losing the keyboard, laptops could be almost half the size and a little bit lighter (admittedly, laptop keyboards don't weigh much, if you've ever taken a laptop apart, the keyboard weighs just a few ounces).
Also, I'd like to point out that when stuff like the "Smart Dust" project gets posted, people rave about how this would make for a great virtual keyboard, but when this shows up, most of the responses are along the lines of "well, even if it is real, it would suck." What the heck?
Furthermore, to all those people complaining about how they can't touch type and therefore it would be useless: maybe you should take a proper typing class or get a copy of tuxtype or mavis beacon or something. Touch typing is a valuable skill. At the very least it'll improve your ability to use vi/emacs/whatever.
>I spent two years playing with human-computer interfaces
I didn't and I still thought this was an obvious hoax. I mean, let's be honest here. There's a photo of a guy with wrist straps and a fifty-word blurb indicating that the straps perform some sort of magic.
What makes me sad is that the best score is 2 of anyone calling this a hoax. That leads me to believe that in the 12 hours since the original posting, not a single mod point was devoted to the TRUTH.
Go slashdot! Liberate me from marketroid tyranny!