Slashdot Mirror
OrbiTouch Keyless Keyboard Review
robyn217 writes "When I last looked at strange, new keyboards (here's the previous thread here on slashdot), I thought I'd seen it all... not even close! I just reviewed a new keyless keyboard, called the OrbiTouch, and gave it a run for its money. It's literally made up of two humps--it reminds me of holding onto my knees rather a keyboard. To type or mouse, you need to move the humps around in a synchronized manner. It's twisted--but it's better for you to decide for yourself--here's the article, OrbiTouch Review: A Keyless Keyboard with lots of pictures. Think you'll give it a test drive? Will it survive the year?"
It would be great if it works as advertise. I am a Laptop user myself and it would help. I don't know if I could get use to the no feel response.
In God we trust, all others require data.
According to the last page of the review, it costs $695. Interesting concept but .... need I say more?
and you've got it made. Sorta like what divers have to use. my biggest complaint about keyboards is their limited motion.... I can relearn to type (tho it would be rather hard, I admit)... just give me a keyboard I can use with 1 hand and rest it wherever I need to (no jokes about a keyboard in your lap, etc ;P)
;-)
Besides, that many keystrokes combined with a good mouse might make sims such as Americas Army quite a bit more interesting
I think I can wait until I see it at wal-mart for $99, thanks.
This is one of the few peices of computer technology that needs to have a better upgrade path... I mean, I get a new video card every year or two... and a complete new system at least once every 4 years... the damn keyboard hasn't changed much in at least the last 10... The MS Natural keyboard was the last 'major' update to the keyboard design, and it wasn't much more than simply splitting it in two... Barely qualifing as an evolution on the design
When are we going to have some real changes? I want something that allows me to enter data as fast as I can think... Why can't we come up with a better general input device??? Keyboards SUCK!
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
From the article:
...
why would anyone design a keyboard like this? In one simple word, comfort.
There are also other reasons why keyboard alternatives like this are cool. Disabled users, obviously. Also for typing where you can't be very accurate, e.g. while riding a bike.
Hmmm wonder if you could type with your feet while surfing during lunch
Hmmm... If it's like holding onto some hot girl's knees...
I just grabbed my knees, and boy is that comfortable!
Antiquated competence won't be a job skill forever.
Hey, a breast-shaped keyboard. Just what a geek needs to surf pr0n!
i think a victoria secret bra might be a decent keyboard cover.
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
From the article:
Despite--or maybe because of--the OrbitTouch's similarity to the female anatomy, it's very comfortable to use. Your hands rest very naturally on the twin domes.
So, instead of clacking away on a keyboard all day I can basically feel up boobies while I work?
Is there a downside to this?
There's a VERY good reason that I like to be able to have one hand free when I surf the web....
Drinking soda, of course.
The Datahand system, reviewed here has a price of $1,295 USD.
Wow. 'Taint cheap, eh?
I can imagine it now -- a geek-wife request: Pretend I'm an OrbiTouch and type something provocative to me, honey!
Brings to meaning to the term 'hands on.'
The learning curve on this device is way too high!
You might as well use two mice with specialized software to have the same effect. At such a high price, I won't even glance at it. Who will carry such monstrosity to work and home?
this will never work as most geeks have little to no experience cupping their hands around two large mounds - the learning curve is just way too steep
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
Really, the only way any of these options will catch on is if people can standardize. Switching between ABCDEFG keyboards (like on my 2way pager and a lot of games) and QWERTY is hard enough. If you have to have a different keyboard at work, home, the library, internet terminal, etc. nobody will ever learn these odd (though likely better) keyboards.
--D
How did you post that message?
Are you really willing to go through the pain of typing with RSI just to be heard on slashdot?
Really, instead of some huge leap, i suggest switching away from QWERTY first. Qwerty was made to slow typing, by making you reach for keys. The reason for this being that the original typewriters would jam if you typed too fast. Obviously, this leads to carpal tunnel, and all that good stuff. DVORAK and some other keyboard formats are made to make it easier, faster, and easier to accurately type. I'm not switching yet, but i'm thinking about it. One of my friends did, and he loves it.
New keyboards are neat and all, but they're still first designs, first revisions. If i'm to try something new (new to me), i'll wait for a year, and see if it's really beneficial. If it is, then i'll look at the cost, and if it's worth it. At this time, this product seems to be more eye candy and "if i have more toys, i win" than actually worthwile. Point: if my g/f wants to use my computer, do i have to switch keyboards? Really, i don't see the $600 benefit in that. not yet at least.
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
Pretty Steep for Geeks, I'd Imagine... I mean most of us are still trying to figure out how to unhook a bra!
Maybe the "female anatomy" should come with the same warning label.
This post is dedicated to all of those
Millions in research and they left out the nipples. Didn't the QA department notice this minor glitch. Oh, you mean it's actually a keyboard? nm.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
OrbitTouch?? Sucky Name. You guys shoulda gone with the more obvious "BoobieBoard"
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
What I wonder is what the response time is in like one of these things ... is it even technically possible to achieve speeds of 120+ wpm on it? (i.e., is the signaling rate of the "orbs" good enough to handle 8 chars per second) Not only that, how fast would a person's wrists have to move on average to move the N millimeters that it takes to do an average "keystroke"?
Also, though I haven't looked at it in comparison to letter frequency, their schema for keystrokes seemed suboptimal, but still pretty good. For example, transitioning from "t" to "h" (arguably one of the most common two-letter combinations in all of typing) requires going from up,right to right,left instead of just leaving one dome the same and moving the other. Same thing with going from "i" to "n" (also very common), you have to go from up,down to down,lower-left. It's a minor thing, but it seems that attention to these things could have a significant impact upon the ease of use (less motion required, which is supposed to be one of their big selling points), and the speed at which people can type on it (if you don't have to move as far, you key faster - kinda like how Dvorak is more optimal than QWERTY).
>I have the chord Control-Alt-Z set up to launch the trusty ol' Notepad (no better application for writing HTML).
:-)
Ahhhh, 2nd year CS students could write a better editor.
vi, my friend, vi
even emacs is better
No wonder he worried about CTS
Scissors work well for that particular issue. It gets expensive, but hey you get to visit Victoria's Secret with her afterwards.
If Darwin was right, you'd be dead by now.
User interface is the major issue here. When I upgrade a video card or CPU, I don't have to learn anything new. I just stick it in and my computer performs better.
Most users want what they are comfortable with. Relearning how to type every two to three years would be a nightmare. This is why applications generally keep the same interface over consecutive versions. Under the hood, they are better, but to the user they appear mostly the same.
Things are done this way because they work.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
that the only intuitive interface is the nipple, and that everything after that is learned. Therefore, I suggest someone come up with a computer interface device that is a nipple one puts in one's mouth, and sucks and bites in various ways. Uh, yeah, thats it.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
It seems to me that in order to get any kind of speed out of this device, you'll be twisting your wrists quite severely.
:P
Of course, Slashdotters have no experience at twisting their wrists at breakneck speed..
Slashdot.. Land of nerds, trolls, and FlameBait..
If it was flesh colored with a clit and an umbelical cord, it would look like Cronenbergs VR devices from Existenz.
Oh wait, if I had to grab a pair of breasts every time I needed to get some work done...
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Having looked at the how it works section it becomes apparent that this is not the answer. Individual letters are "typed" by chord like movements of both hands. Some what akin to using two joysticks to type. This is neither easy nor intuitive. And that is the biggest sticking point.
Input devices such as keyboards and mice need to be intuitive and easy to use. Keyboards are very intuitive, a panel full of labeled buttons is presented. Pressing one of the buttons prints the label on the screen. Even very young children have no problem figuring out how to use a keyboard. Indeed the only thing you need to "learn" about using a keyboard is the actual key placement as a QWERTY is not intuitive key placement for the uninitiated. Just watch a five year old at the keyboard and you will know what I mean. Then imagine th same five year old trying to figure out the OrbiTouch.
I'm afraid to say that we cannot expect further advancement beyond the regular keyboard. It has been advanced to the fullest useful level possible. To get to the next level a totally different input device will be required, not a keyboard at all. The last such step that we have seen in input devices was the mouse, now >30 years old. The next step in input devices will be either voice recognition or some form of direct mind-to-pc interface. Right now, voice recognition seems to be the closest to reallity but, given its imaturity, it is still a few years off.
All keyboards just need to report their keycodes to the machine (where the keyboard driver/definition translates them into the actual text encoding) The techonology has been around for years, and is quite flexible allowing multiple language specific keyboards to be attached to the same hardware.
What is needed is really a user upgrade. People have invested a lot of time in learing exactly where the letters are located on their particular keyboard. (I know this as I recently had to "relean" the locations of various keys on a Spanish keyboard). Imagine asking someone to memorize (to the point of not thinking about it) the various dual-joystick combinations to type out a typical email. Or if not this device, the various mouse gestures (mouse based keyboard), hand wriggling (joystick based keyboard), eye-control (for eye-tracking keyboard), or other method of input.
Certainly there will be adopters, but there will be a rough cost-benifit analysis by the masses. Most that will conclude it's more expensive to learn new keyboard type when the new keyboard only offers the same functionality of inputting text into a computer.
when you're typing on a conventional keyboard, you're pretty much pipelining your next couple keys. When you type "ASDF" as your pinkie is coming down, your next find is ready to depress the S and ther your middle finger should be resting on the D. You just can't do that on the keyboard in question. You have to use both hands to make every single letter -- you'd think that they would have made the left or ride side movements by themselves to type a vowel.
"Will it survive the year?"
Considering that it came out before Christmas of 2000 (hint: ~2.4 years ago), I'd say there is a pretty good chance.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
I sugarest erybondy get ron too$!!
How i am supposed to frag terrorists in CS with this thing! According to the article it is either in mouse mode or keyboard mode at one time. QWERTY makes FPS fans happy.
My boy, my boy!
How fast can you type with this thing?!
The reviewer should consider using the thing for a month (exclusively), and tell us whether he learned how to do use it in the end. Furthermore, he should tell us what his WPM is with a regular keyboard, and what his WPM is with this thing is (in a month's time).
The assumption with giving him a month's time is that the novelty (for me) would last about a month. If most people wouldn't be up to keyboard speed in a month, I can't imagine many people sticking to it.
a joystick in between ...
We all know that Walmart is the fastest to embrace new technology...they even have these High-tech DVD's that remove the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen!
Well, if you looked over the article and especially the keyboard pictures, the movements are basically "Street Fighter 2" style moves. For example, to do a fireball with Ryu, one simply need to do a "down,down-forward,forward "
On the same token to type a 'd', you need to do "back,forward". I credit the creator of the device for taking moves that are used in fighting games and using them in unique ways(like this keyboard).
In fighting games, you have endless number of moves, which I've seen many people(not me) master very well in the arcades. So maybe this new keyboard will work?
I am tired of having only one mouse and cursor on my computer, I think the keyboard should be split in 2 like Either of these 2 keyboards TouchStream ST or, DataHand.
Then, a optical mouse eye should be under each half, which controls a left hand and right hand mouse pointer.
So much more could be done with computer UI if we had 2 mouse pointers.
Do you eat a steak with one hand? And if you merge the keyboard with the mouse you don't have to switch you had back and forth over and over again.
(Trying not to be off-topic for this post, but...)
This is one of the things the Dvorak layout was made to exploit. For instance, (now is the time to look at a key chart) typing the word "month" on dvorak makes the "nth" basically one motion. The vowel combinations are this way as well. That "pipelining" is particularly good when the keys in the pipe are nearby on different fingers on the same hand. Qwerty does well at cross-hand patterns, but some of those can be vulnerable to miss-timing issues. (The first auto-correct entry is "teh"->"the").
They couldn't get them all, though, such as "gh" "ct" "rn" etc. but I guess those are statistically less frequent than the big ones: "th" "sh" "cr" and so on... I like the example word some Dvorak article used to show the difference. Excruciating. Type it in Qwerty, then go look it up on a dvorak. Not that we all type "excruciating" that often, but is a somewhat worst-case example.
Just more shameless advocacy of the Dvorak layout.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi omnem pecuniam tuam mihi dabis, ad tuum caput saxum immane mittam.
The idea of all these crazy keyboard designs completely misses the point. Of course there is a place for new and innovative keyboards for accessibility reasons, but if you want to reduce repetitive strain injury, why not try speech recognition? I'm dictating this right now, and boy my hands feel fine!
Naturally speech recognition doesn't work perfectly, but it works well enough to be much faster and user friendly than a keyboard. And at $695.00 you can save yourself a lot of money!
I can see it now... combine the Orbi with the Real Doll.... A USB adapter coming out of her side....
No really, I need this for work...
An alternative to 8-way joysticks might just be two optical mice. Software can easily determine the 8 different directions of movement for each independent mouse and combine the different combinations into a single key-click equivalent. With mice you would have the added benefit that they can be placed anywhere in front you rather than the fixed distance between the pads on this device. Even better an escape sequence could be added so one or both mice toggle between character entry and mouse pointing.
The fastest words to type are those that involve only one hand. When we have to coordinate between 2 hands we are much slower (consider playing piano, how much work is it to play with one hand as compared to 2 hands). Quite frankly, 7mm is a large movement.
2 things I want from my keyboard. First is speed, second is ease of use. Having 2 stubby joy mounds (they are too round to be called sticks) to move around together is not easy, and 7mm is not small enough.
I want something that you move the device 1 mm to activate it and the entire keyboard should be mapped to one hand.
I agree with your analysis of the touchstream products. However, I will wait until they come out with a programming interface for it.