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

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).

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.

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.

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...

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.

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. :)

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.

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.