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

Cool, but...

[jawad]

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.

Re:Cool, but...

[Zurk]

its easy to set up a small rubber pad with the key symbols stuck on it so you get tactile feedback with a rollable non electronic pad which you can carry around.
just unroll it on the nearest surface and start typing on the rubber. tactile feedback and true spillproof keyboard with no electronics. just chuck it in a washing machine to clean it.

Re:Cool, but...

[Anonymous DWord]

That's similar to the problem the military had when testing out the F-16, which has electric controls- the stick didn't move at all. Pilots kept complaining about it, so they put a little play into it, even though technologically they didn't need it. People like physical responses to the things they touch.

As long as there's at least some aural feedback.

[dwlemon]

Perhaps the "click-boing" of a Model M could be played with every sucessful keystroke.

We're all insane

[geophile]

Not all that long ago, if you saw someone walking down the street, talking to someone who wasn't there, and typing on a keyboard that wasn't there, you'd wonder what institution he escaped from.

Now, it's just an alpha geek talking on his cell phone and checking his email (with a monitor embedded in his Oakley's no doubt).

Question:

[Wind_Walker]

Will the keyboard have a configurable layout? Remember, not everybody in the world still used the outdated "Qwerty" format...

Also, without seeing the keys, how would I know if it is the long-backspace button, or the shorter button (which I hate!)?

Also, there is a definate tactile feel to pressing the keys; you can *tell* when the button is depressed. This feature is difficult to replicate.

This would really cause problems with respect to picking up the "board" and quickly working on it. Believe it or not, sight *is* important.

This device will never get off the ground, for my money.

that's gonna look strange...

[turbine216]

...picture this - you're sitting in the boardroom, your boss to your left side, and the prospective multi-million dollar client across the table from you, and you're taking notes on your palm pilot...

PECKING AWAY AT YOUR INVISIBLE KEYBOARD.

And you thought the Sega Activator made you look stupid.

Vaporous... Very, Very Vaporous

[starslab]

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.

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)

Man, where's the "%" key...?

[MadCow42]

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.

Oh great...

[chinton]

Sensors in the units measure the finger movements and artificial intelligence and a language processor determine appropriate keystrokes or mouse movements. What kind of AI? If I type in my bosses name on the virtual keyboard, will it display "Brain Damaged Lazy Bastard"?

Cool!

[oGMo]

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.

I habr onw

[gosand]

^I habr onw, it id v3ry cppl. I an usinf it right noq! Bit I an mot a veru good tyoist. :-)

Hmm

[Man of E]

I wonder how the keyboard "knows" when I'm actually trying to press on a key, versus when I'm just resting my fingers in the home position?
What if I need to grab a drink? What if I briefly wave my hands around? What if I scratch my head because I don't know what to type next?

I'm not sure that the language recognition and "artificial intelligence" they proclaim this thing has would make it comfortably usable, even for short periods of time. Too many little inconveniences, and things you'd have to stop doing while having a keyboard permanently attached to your hands.

Re:Hmm

[kettch]

Maybe it'll just print things like *scratches head* *waves madly* *picks nose*, or other things...

Re:Hmm

[G-funk]

Maybe it'll just print things like *scratches head* *waves madly* *picks nose*, or other things...


*Stop that dave*

*Dave, what would Karen think?*

*Dave, you'll go blind you know*

Douglas Adams Strikes Again

[dwdyer]

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.

Doesn't anyone remember their childhood fables?

[circletimessquare]

"The Emperor's New Clothes"
by Hans Christian Andersen

"What a marvelous technological advance!"
"What an engineering coup de grace!"

Doesn't anyone see what these Senseboard Technologies AB guys are doing to us?

Duh!

;-P

Look into my eyes when I am conversating with you.

[rice_burners_suck]

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.

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.

Sounds Cool

[Grond]

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. :)

Right out of Einstein's Bridge (c) 1997

[chrisvr]

The first time I saw these virtual keyboard things, I immediately said "Hey-- I read this in a science fiction story once!"

After a bit of searching, I found it-- the exact concept exists in _Einstein's Bridge_, by John Cramer-- came out in 1997.

Here's the bit that discusses the idea:

He opened his briefcase and removed the magic glasses and the data cuffs. He switched on the small computer inside and made sure that its sensor flap was extended outside when he latched the briefcase lid, then slipped it back under the seat in front of him. He pressed a switch recessed in a thick earpiece of the magic glasses, then put them on. He draped the flesh colored data cuff around his left wrist, just in front of his wrist watch, and secured it with the Velcro joint underneat. He repeated the process on his right writs and activated the calibration process, flexing finger, twisting wrists, and bending elbows.

The glasses produced a display screen presented vertically in front of him and a horizontal keyboard etched in bright lines in midair. He reached out, grasped the screen, and moved and stretched it until it filled the full area of the seat back in front of him, then positioned the virtual keyboard to a more confortable position at the surface of the tray table. He called up the report he'd been working on earlier and began to type and revise.

...

He held up the flesh-colored objects in his lap. "These are data cuffs. They go around my wrists and measure my hand and finger positions by monitoring the movement of tendons in my wrists with Doppler-shift ultrasonics. They send the information to the computer over another infrared link. The glasses were making the image of a keyboard on the tray table. When I typed, the cuffs detected my finger motions, the computer correlated them with the locations of the keys it was drawing, and the words I typed appeared on the computer screen that I saw on the seat back."

Thought it was a facinating idea when I first read it-- seems fairly useless without the "magic glasses"...

Re:Obligatory Doug Adams reference

[raju1kabir]

What happens if someone throws a pencil through the keyboard's on/off zone?

There is a certain other Slashdot reader who was playing with the Mac's speech recognition for a time when we worked in the same office in a faraway land back in 1993. It was hooked into the menu manager, and any command available on a current menu (including the systemwide apple menu) was executed if spoken.

The crowning pleasure of my long and varied life came from adding a system shutdown alias to the apple menu, and then walking up behind him and announcing "Shut down" to his computer while he was having staredowns with the monitor.