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Review Of Upcoming Projection Keyboards
malpern writes "I've written a review of upcoming virtual keyboards based on published reports. There are pictures, descriptions, and details for each of the four major manufactures (Virtual Devices, Developer VKB, Canesta, and Senseboard Technologies)."
Such keyboards would be great with PDAs and other portable devices.
But I suspect that using one constantly (such as for you desktop machine at work) would produce lots of pain and suffering. Banging your fingers on the probably hard solid no-give surface of a desk all day probably wouldn't be great fun. Stopping your fingers before they hit the desk would be a quick route to RSI land... I guess you could put somethign soft where your fingers will hit, but then why not just use a nice clickity-clackity keyboard...
On the plus side, it'd make those old games where you have to push two keys in quick succession over and over again (Summer Games for example) much easier.
On that note, did anyone else build a 'joystick' for the C64 out of 2 nails some wire and a screw driver, just so they could get really fast times in the 100 meter sprint on that game?
You would develop some pretty nasty RSI issues if you used this a lot...but who's going to do that. I think the purpose of the technology is to allow you to bang out a quick (and irrelevent) SlashDot comment while on the move. This would be great on the train home from work for example. You could reply to all your email of the day in otherwise unused time - then spend the 30 minutes you normally take to email people with your family instead.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
The article seems to be a little dated. There's not publication date, but several references are almost a year old. Details are thin, but honest for a product that's yet to see the light of day.
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
I'd like to see something like this where you could switch between keyboard layouts like QWERTY, Dvorak, Typematrix, Kinesis, etc...
sig.
The first would be the lack of tactile response. After all, your desktop or any other hard surface would become uncomfortable after just a few minutes IMHO.
The second would be the lack of any position designators - i.e. the 'f' and 'j' keys. Most 10 fingered typers probably don't even think about it anymore, but it's very easy to lose your place without them. I suspect this would become very annoying if taking notes in class during a lecture or in a business meeting.
As far as a good portable keyboard for a PDA, my money is on the new Stowaway XT. It's been getting really good reviews/previews.
Anyone been lucky enough to play around with one yet?
i.e. what happens when one finger taps a key that is in the shadow of another finger? The review doesn't mention this.
I seriously doubt anyone could use these at full-speed, because there is no tactile feelback! The whole point of touch-typing is to type by feel, not by reading the keys. Poking at the keys one at a time is possibly worse than handwriting recognition speeds, and vastly inferior to speech recognition. I pity the company that invested $20 million into this useless novelty item.
He hasn't used any of these, so it doesn't quite count as a review. Has anyone seen any of these devices work? So far I can't think of any actual hands-on reviews of them.
Looks like an innovative idea, but I like to have something tangible i can touch; i like to feel the key being depressed so that i know i typed it. i don't (can't) type perfectly, and i'm sure i sometimes press a key that would be obscured by the front of my hand.- pressing the space bar with my thumb, for example? i'm sure that would be out of view of the projector in front of me.
Maybe a good idea if you need to do lots of typing on a PDA, but who actually does? the screen's are too small to format anything anyway. PDAs are good for short notes but not inputing loads of text.
Thats my view anyway. not intended as a troll, i'm just not convinced.
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If the technology senses finger location then the layout of the keyboard should be irrelevant, leaving the door open for the keyboard layout to be rearranged virtually. While this wouldn't be so practical for work (except for maybe switching keyboard nationality at the press of a button), how badass would that be for gaming?
Load up UT 2005 and your keyboard layout changes to put a ton of extra keys around your direction arrows. Instead of trying to remember that Ctrl+P+2 balances your shields in Tie Fighter, you have a large "balance shields" key wherever you want it. RTS games always have somewhat unintuitive keyboard setups because they have so many keys... well imagine a soft/bouncy surface onto which a different specialized, user mappable, user configurable keyboard was projected for EACH app/game. I don't know if we'll see this right away... but I sure as hell want too.
But many of us technochrats still dislike the feel of laptop keyboards because they don't respond quite "right". I suspect these new virtual keyboards will take quite a bit of getting used to and won't be adpoted very quickly.
Just a guess, of course.
All these comments about drumming, touching hard or soft surfaces, typing in shadows or accounting for tactile feedback...
These projected, virtual keyboards have little to do with drumming, touching hard or soft surfaces, typing in shadows or accounting for tactile feedback...they have everything to do with motion, however.
The concept is really that simple...don't get lost in trying to overlay traditional ideas about traditional keyboards onto what is a new concept that must be tried out in person before giving an otherwise off-base opinion.
In TRON, Ed Dillinger (David Warner) had a large, black glass desk in his office. The keyboard was a glowing projection on the desk surface from inside the desk. It was very cool, but I had exactly the same thoughts about tactile feedback that many people are expressing here.
Peter.