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Virtual Keyboard

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-thats-just-bizarre dept.

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.

3 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Man, where's the "%" key...? by MadCow42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  2. Douglas Adams Strikes Again by dwdyer · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Imagine the effort it will take to not type, if every movement is interpreted as a potential keystroke. I was reminded of this passage from the Hitchhiker's Guide:
    A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wavebands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.
    --
    -dwd-
  3. Sounds Cool by Grond · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. :)