Virtual Keyboard a Reality

billmaly writes "Yahoo has a photo and blurb here about a Virtual Keyboard That shows a photo and bit of text on a virtual keyboard for Palm and other mobile devices. Applications seen for mobile computing, as well as areas where a standard, physical keyboard are not practical. Very cool stuff from Siemens!"

Comments

Speed?

[SimplyCosmic]

Besides the question of how quickly and accurately this device can detect your "key taps", there's also the question of the lack of tactile feedback from a physical key press slowing you down.

Sure it's psychological, but I can remember just how painfully slow typing on my Timex Sinclair's membrane keyboard was.

Add to that the normal lag of a character appearing on the screen, and I'll hazard a guess that using the built in hand recognisition will be the way to go.

reconfiguration?

[nesneros]

Wonder if you can automatically re-configure it to simulate Dvorak keyboard? That would be wonderful.

Cool

[redhog]

Hm, why not turn of that projector, and you'l have an invisible keyboard, that one must know where if is to tap in things on. Perfect for placing outside ones door as a lock (log in with username and password, without any feedback at all, to gain access to the house). In addition, it will look damn cool when one just move ones hands in strange patterns on a totally normal table next to the door, and the door magically opens. And when someone examines the table, it is just a normal table...

Still not there yet, but we're getting close.

[Uttles]

Virtual keyboard, wow! This is really a cool invention. It's a great step forward for mini computing. Hell, it's a great step forward for all computing, I'm sure there will be many applications for just about every device that requires wide ranging input. The problem is, like a lot of folks have said here, that there's no tactile feedback, which will slow down the expert no-look typers. I myself don't look at the keyboard and type rather quickly, and I know for certain that without the feeling of the keys I would not be able to type at all. OK, so we're going to have to actually look at the virtual keyboard to do any typing... that's a hinderance, but it's still better than no keyboard.

We're still not to the point of "easy" data input for all computer devices. When you think about it, typing on a standard keyboard really isn't that easy. Even when you get used to it, you still make mistakes. The real "revolution" of computer input devices will be when some completely new idea comes along about how to send get input from a human and send the characters to the computer. It will take something like a glove that reads finger movement and types based on combinations of twitches, or maybe a perfect speech recognition system that can figure out the context of your words and spell everything magically. Those might not be the best solutions, or even possible for that matter, but it's going to take something like that before computing input devices get to the point where they're actually "easy" to use.

Been there, but not done that

[pieterh]

I tried to invent something like this in 1994 or so. There are so many advantages to the concept, not just because it replaces a fold-out keyboard. You can chose your layout arbitrarily. Put the Enter key anywhere. Make a DVORAK. You can make the whole keyboard larger or smaller as you like. Place the keyboard on your knees when you're in a cramped plane seat.

This combined with direct retinal stimulated displays would make for more portable computing.

One idea I had to recognise finger positions (and I've also seen this announced since then) was for a sensor wristband that could learn what you were typing from measuring the nervous signals and tendon positions through the wrist.

Roll on the day when we can throw away those real keyboards! It will be about 50 years too late.