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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)."
If the moment I turn one of these laser keyboards on my cat will go nuts?
Some of those toys were meant to be released last year, but I have not seen them available. I really could use the wireless/bluetooth one at the end, as my space I have available for my computers is being reduced by another human being born into the world.
Anyway my *icrosoft ergo keyboard is looking very tattered and worn out!
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
the feel of keyboards which is important too. I don't think this will pick up especially the senseboard ones (the rest atleast have a keyboard image). Type into thin air !! People around may take you for being psychotic or something. Plus I would really like someone to do this: "Now where is that Enter key?" heh heh heh.....
That'll never fly in school. Who wasn't getting in shit all the time for drumming on the desk eh?
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?
I hope you don't actually have to touch the surface that it's being projected on. A couple weeks back somebody posted a link to a modified typewriter keyboard to use on a computer because his wife's fingers reacted badly to the jarring motion of using a touchtype keyboard. Imagine how jarring it would be to repeatedly slam your fingers against such a hard surface...
sig.
I have been waiting for something like this for a long time now. I have keyboard preferences that many people deem odd (Sun 3 keyboard, QWERTY layout, essentially), and this looks like the answer to my problem.
I also like that at least one of the devices will have RS232-C output. That will make connection to older devices a lot easier, and drivers easy to write.
Does anyone have any idea when these will hit the Canadian market? Sometimes we lag behind the US market, and other times we get it a week or two early.
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
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.
hard surface!
display it on a pillow or any cushion.
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 want to know how you'd wedge the little light-keys off and move them around to confuse co-workers. that's gonna be hard...
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.
Still, I'm excited by this technology. Now someone needs to marry it up with a similarly sized projection screen and we can have a computer with a full-sized screen and full sized keyboard that you can fit into your palm.
a world in progress...
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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We used to use noisy typewriters.
Now it is the traditional keyboard's time to face replacement.
It'll take a whole generation, no doubt, of people who were raised up on projection keyboards, before it becomes accepted the way keyboards now are.
It's a radical new concept and we technocrats should at least have some kind of open mind about it.
Although there are nagging issues.. such as whether or not those keystrokes will be nore easily interfered with or intercepted...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
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.
If the moment I turn one of these laser keyboards on my cat will go nuts?
I wonder if my kitty takes a nap on the desk with the keyboard on, will it make a neato image of all the keys on her back?
Talk about a great way to pick up a g33k girl.
"your kitty is *so* cuuute! Hey, is that Dvorak on her ass?"
I don't think this is gonna fly. While yes, it's a great idea, it also has a good amount of cons to it. First of all is the aethetics of it. The thing about normal (qwerty) keyboards is that you can modify angle, etc. But these are at minimum height.
Then there is the one which didn't even have a visualization. Then you'd have to worry about where the center of your keyboard is, etc.
THen there is the sight factor, how would people react so see a person typing on a projection?
Next is the fact that it HAS to have a surface, an advantage you don't need for fold-up keyboards or using the pen-on-screen approach.
What I think they should do is make them similar to DDR pads. Seriously, You make them small, they'll have plenty of room for keys, you can fold them up so you have portability. Then you can have just a thin foldup sheet of some sort of stiff material for support so you can use it on your lap while being on a subway or something like that.
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
I've used a rigid, zero-feedback keyboard (a TouchStream prototype) quite a lot.
For typing tasks like programming and writing articles, it starts off mildly annoying and rapidly becomes agonizingly horrible. However, I was very impressed by the potential for non-typing input, e.g. gestures, dragging the mouse pointer without having to move your hand off the keyboard.
I think these boards would be great for the pda/cellphone market but for heavy workstation use it's just terrible ergonomics -- specially when the perfect keyboard already exists! That's the Kinesis Contour for those trapped in the land of flat keyboards.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
If you're going to find a niche in market like this its got to be disrutive. And this is definitely disruptive.
On the Eco front, think of how much less plastic that won't end up in a landfill!
This scores on two fronts, as well as being, well, pretty damn cool! I'd love to be one of the first people using one of these on the train to work.
Its one damn thing before another. (Dick Bird 1999)
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.
As someone who has learnt to touch type pretty successfully, which makes a huge difference to the way I work, I can't see these things being any use to me at all. You need to feel the gaps between the keys to indicate where they are. Sure for the "hunt and peck" mob out there this is a nice gadget to play with, but for a techy on the move who can actually type its not going to be useful.
I'd prefer a tiny keyboard (I can touch type on a Nokia Communicator, its just about adjusting slightly) than one with no tactile feel.
I understand why this will be great for somepeople, but for for speed typists this isn't very useful. Now a tactile glove might work a treat, well two of them obviously.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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.
I can't think of a scheme that seems reliable.
I saw some of these a CEBIT last year and the projector is a few inches above the desk and angled down at about 45deg. Didn't get to try any though.
You've got to interrupt the beam of several letters just to "press" one key, so it must be pretty "smart" just to work that out.
I guess it can assume it's on a flat surface but if it doesn't know how fat your fingers are then it doesn't know when you've touched the table either.
Maybe there's a secondary scanner at table height that returns the x/y of anything that interrupts the beam?
If you set this on a mirror, will all your words come out backwards?
This is just another solution looking a problem. Keyboard typing is about pressing buttons. Its been that way since the 1st typewriter. This is about simulating that since people know it but the finger suffer too much shock hitting a non spring loaded surface. It becomes a major issue to use this often.
Years ago when I had toys to play with that would do most of this, it became painful typeing on a bit of paper and detecting where the finger where. It just didn't work but looked like a good idea on paper and the sparc 1 could cope with the image processing needed. The major problem was people tend to drift if they don't have the physical feedback so you know where the key "centers" are. Modern keyboards suck with that compared with old 3270 keyboards which had an indent on J & F while the new ones tend to use some sort of raised edge. A projected keyboard won't have either.
A cheap $10 rubber keyboard will roll up and go anywhere and it doens't abuse the finger tips so I don't see these expensive things going anywhere people have a real need to type. The projection things are ok for "yes/no" and "Enter your Name" but not useful for much of anything else.
To:info@virtualdevices.net
From: Me
Subject: Vaporware
What's the deal, so you have something or not? Pictures of it actually projecting a keyboard would be nice. Somebody should tell your artist you can't see the cone of the laser in the air.
Forget that and sell your gravity defying PDA's and Cell phones that you have pictured at the bottom of the pdf.
I hope he's typing on his lap dear. Oh look, there's a policeman!
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
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.
While this may be a arguably nice toy for people who have to search for every key, it seems to be quite a drawback for those who can type "properly".
I need the minuscle feedback when moving over the keys to have body memory kick so I can find the keys instinctively. When I type, I don't have to think where the key is, all done autonomously.
Try it with a piece of paper with a printed keyboard on it. Not a chance to type blindly (which I do all of the time), and you won't get up to any decent speed even with looking at the keys.
But thats exactly what I'd require from a "next generation" keyboard for PDAs and the like, if I want to enter text at a slow pace there are already a lot of viable alternatives.
When my desk gets covered in paper I wounld'nt have to dig my keyboard out. I could just keeping on working over the top of it.
Bah. Might be a bit tricky to use on the bus.
I would think that this makes it worse? I was under the impression that tapping your fingers on a hard surface was exactly what you should *not* do.
There was a previous article about a guy that hacked a typewriter to function as a keyboard for this very reason.
Reminds me of an old Dilbert cartoon:
Salesman: Try our FingerComputer 5000. It has a powerful AI, and implants under your fingernails so it can sense your typing. Of course, not everyone wants an intelligent computer knowing what they've been doing.
Voice from his finger: Dave, about last night...
What's this Submit thingy do?
Give me a TouchStream anyday. =) I don't want stupid red light, black with print is the way to go. Same effect, but no red light. I can see where these projection keyboards would be useful though, but I can see where they wouldn't be (work, school, home). Of course, on an airplane, travelling, etc, it'd be great. Just imagine a screen, and that's your laptop. Oops.
Still, it's good technology, even if not applied in the best sense here. Imagine your house is X10
controlled(sans the pop-ups, of course). You pull out one of these things with custom buttons you did on your PC. Hit the lights that you want on/off and the wireless transmitter sends it back to the server to do it. Or you could have these 'magic' buttons built into a painting or art(-wannabe) object, and access them anytime anywhere, but keep them out of place. (Yes, this example took the technology and not the specific use of the projection keyboards).
At lot of the comments here seems to forget that these new types of keyboards aren't meant for replacing your good old trusted keyboard. As the article states it's a product for PDAs and other small devices.
The goal is to make something better than what we have today, i.e. Palm's Graffiti or T9-systems found on cell phones.
Personally I'm really looking forward to something like this, because I think it would open up a whole new world for my Pocket PC.
Having converted to one of those split 'natural' keyboards (now I don't get carple-tunnel anymore) on both my home and work systems, and the fact that I touch type - and have difficulty keeping on my home keys *with* feedback, I find these virtual keyboards of limited usefulness.
Yeah, they might be good in limited applications - and probably more for the hunt and peck crowd, as someone else has mentioned. They are not for me.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Will an infinite number of sleeping kitties on an infinite number of virtual keyboards eventually produce the great works of Shakespeare?
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