AlphaGrip's 3D Keyboard Ready For Pre-Orders

bic2k writes "AlphaGrip has opened their doors to pre-orders this past week. (Previously mentioned here.) Press release can be found here. They look a lot like an xbox controller, but contains 42 buttons and a analog stick. Shows up as a standard USB keyboard and mouse. Has a USB expansion slot, which will possibly be used for wireless connectivity. They claim typing speeds of 50 WPM or better after a month or so. They're waiting for 5000 pre-orders before going to manufacturing, so it may be awhile before they actually ship these."

Comments

Fifth generation?

[way2trivial]

why can't I find any references to the previous generations/iterations anywhere?

looked all over google- nothing listed anywhere...no images, no froogle, no weburls.. nada...

Re:Fifth generation?

[yo303]

why can't I find any references to the previous generations/iterations anywhere?

Because you didn't try a patent search?

They have four patents (one design) dating back to 2001. The first was filed in 1998.

yo.

QWERTY - yes, for avoiding jams

[Moraelin]

Actually, while QWERTY wasn't designed to slow people down, it _is_ designed to avoid jams.

The thing is, the contraption consisted of (more or less) a semi-circle of thin levers, each with a little hammer with an embossed letter on it. All were aimed at the same position on the paper. You press a key, and purely mechanically the lever would swing the hammer at the paper. (Well, actually, at the ribbon.)

Also, because it was a purely mechanical contraption, the cheapest and most reliable way to build one was: keys that are close on the keyboard, would also activate levers which were close to each other.

Jams would happen when two close enough levers would be activated at the same time. Or close enough. The closer the levers were, the more likely you'd get a jam. (Again, purely coincidentally, this also meant "the closer two keys were".)

E.g., pressing "Q" and "P" at (almost) the same time would never jam. They swung from opposite directions, and it was pretty much guaranteed that one hammer would simply hit on top of the other. E.g., "A" and "S" at the same time (e.g., while typing "ASSASSIN") would pretty much always jam.

So basically, QWERTY:

1. was just supposed to prevent jams. (Which cost more in typing speed than a couple ms worth of more finger movement.)

2. was not designed to do anything to typing speed as such. Neither maximize it, nor minimize it. Whatever typing speed difference it produced, it was "side effect", rather than "goal". (And, again, a lot of it came from jam prevention rather than anything else.)

3. the _only_ typing speed consideration it received at all, was a rigged tech demo. Ever wondered why the "QWERTYUIOP" row? Because the rigged tech demo was basically "Look! I can type 'TYPEWRITER' quickly! It must be an optimal layout!" Hence all the letters in the word TYPEWRITER had to be on a single row.

(Hardly a scientific study, but PHBs bought it anyway.)

Furthermore, I'd point out that:

A. It did a piss-poor job even at spacing common letter combinations apart. E.g., even in their tech-demo "TYPEWRITER" they have letters which are near each other: "TY", "EW", "ER", and thus prone to jamming. "W" and "R" aren't that far apart to be jam-proof either.

B. if you've ever used one of those purely mechanical typewriters (no, some electronic thing doesn't count), you'll notice that typing was a different exercise on those. It involved keeping your hands above the keyboard and hitting the keys pretty hard. At the very least it's _not_ the same RSI prone position you'd use on a normal PC keyboard.

C. a PC keyboard doesn't jam.

D. Even if you do type the wrong letters on the PC, the cost of errors is next to nil. Correcting a mistake was a _very_ time consuming operation on a mechanical typewriter, since it involved physically erasing or covering printed stuff with white paint. By comparison, hitting backspace on the keyboard costs a small fraction of a second.

Etc.

So basically I'm saying that the considerations from which QWERTY was born, not only were imperfect to start with, they bear exactly _zero_ relevance to a computer keyboard. That QWERTY still works well, is more of a testimony to the fact that people can learn _any_ keyboard layout well enough, than some inherent advantage.

QWERTY, Dvorak, even alphabetical order, IMHO you probably just type faster on whatever you have more exercise. That's all.