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CES: Another Chording Keyboard Hits the Market (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the we-love-all-inventors-no-matter-what dept.

Wayne Rasanen's Decatxt chording keyboard may be new and exciting to him, and he says has a patent on it so apparently the USPTO found it novel and original, but it's not the first chording keyboard by many long shots. The idea has been around (at least) since 1968. And let's not forget Braille chording keyboards, as described in a 1992 IEEE paper. And if you have an iPhone and want to experiment with a virtual Braille chording keyboard, there's an app for that. Maybe we're just jaded. Or maybe we've known a lot of blind people who used one-handed Braille chording keyboards to type as fast with one hand as a sighted person using a QWERTY keyboard and two hands. So it's hard for us to get excited about a chording keyboard. Be that as it may, we wish Wayne Rasanen all the luck in the world as he brings his invention to market.

24 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. That must hurt by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It really doesn't look comfortable to use. Must be awesome to develop RSI with.
    With a little bit of practice you can easily use a normal keyboard without looking at it all the time.

    1. Re:That must hurt by myxiplx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yup, that looks about as ergonomic as a medieval rack, and with a simple linear set of letter combinations and no apparent thought gone in to making them easy to use.

      The Agenda micro writer my baby sister had back in the 1990's was light years ahead of this.

    2. Re:That must hurt by camperdave · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly. Your most common letters should be on the strongest fingers. For right handed English speakers, that means the right index finger should be E, not A; and the right middle finger should be T, not B.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    3. Re:That must hurt by uniquename72 · · Score: 4, Informative

      ... QWERTY keyboard, which by design was to slow people down...

      This is a common myth, and totally fabricated.

    4. Re:That must hurt by Roman+Coder · · Score: 2

      Ok, so I've read that article twice, and I don't see where it disproves the 'myth' that the original QWERTY keyboard was laid out in a way to prevent the keys from sticking on the 1st gen typewriters. It talks about disproving that Dvorak keyboard layout is better, but didn't see anything about the jamming keys myth busted.

      I'm nursing a coffee from a night of no sleep, so maybe its just me, but if you could point me to the relevant text that its been proven to be a myth?

      --
      "The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Yakir Aharonov
    5. Re:That must hurt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      The myth isn't about jamming keys. That did happen, and the layout was designed to reduce jams. The myth is actually that it achieves this by slowing typing down. The qwerty layout moves characters that are often typed in sequence to be as far away from each other across the arc of swing arms on a typewriter. This allows faster typing, because the heads are in range to crash for a shorter time.

    6. Re:That must hurt by UltraZelda64 · · Score: 2

      Do you have the same definition of touch typing that I do?

      Resting four fingers of each hand on the proper home keys in the home row, moving them as needed to hit other keys, and returning them back to their home positions? That is the proper method of touch typing.

      Or is "blind typing" typing using *any* method with your eyes closed?

      QWERTY: Patent filed 1867. Patent sold to Remington in 1873. Became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878.

      Touch typing: "Frank Edward McGurrin, a court stenographer from Salt Lake City, Utah who taught typing classes, reportedly invented touch typing in 1888."
      and...
      "Frank Edward McGurrin, a court stenographer from Salt Lake City who taught typing classes, reportedly invented touch typing. On July 25, 1888, McGurrin, who was reportedly the only person using touch typing at the time, won a decisive victory over Louis Traub (operating Caligraph with eight-finger method) in a typing contest held in Cincinnati. The results were displayed on the front pages of many newspapers. McGurrin won US$500 (equivalent to $11,400 in 2007 USD) and popularized the new typing method."

      I didn't feel like scouring the web for all this information again so I just went to the Wikipedia articles for QWERTY and touch typing, but I have seen these basic facts repeated at several sites through Google searches. But the fact is, no matter what small changes or interpretations of the story you might find from article to article, the dates don't lie. The QWERTY layout was not designed for touch typing, and the various other facts on its design back this up. I have yet to see an article that says touch typing existed before the QWERTY layout... remember, that's the layout that popularized typewriters in the first place, being the layout that the first successful typewriters used. Advanced typing techniques can't just be discovered without a keyboard to figure them out on.

  2. target market by Russ1642 · · Score: 2

    Why go into business to make a product that targets like 0.0001% of the market? In my office there are only like three people who can type without looking at their keyboard.

    1. Re:target market by blind+biker · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In my office there are only like three people who can type without looking at their keyboard.

      I really hope that there are only about 5 people in your office, or else it seems like your company is employing morons.

      --
      "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
    2. Re:target market by silverhalide · · Score: 2

      Do you work at the DMV?

    3. Re:target market by camperdave · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Your company needs to send folks on a touch typing course, then, because hundreds of people hunt-and-peck typing is wasting all sorts of man-hours of time.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    4. Re:target market by PoolOfThought · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why go into business to make a product that targets like 0.0001% of the market?

      That's like asking why the company that made "spinner" rims decided to go into business (or branch out into) with a product that only appealed to a small group of people. Especially when only a small group of them could afford them. The "market" wasn't everyone with a car... it was everyone with a car who wanted to look cool sitting at a stoplight and had money they were willing to allocate toward that purpose. The bonus is that there was very little competition (partially because the market is so small). WAY SMALL MARKET, but still tons of money to be made if the premium / markup is sufficiently high.

      You probably consider "the market" to be "all people that use keyboards at all". But that's not true for him just like the market for spinners isn't everyone that has a car. He likely considers the market to be a very specific subset of computer users, and therefore his product actually targets 100% of "the market" as he's defined it. His pricing also demonstrates that he knows his market is tiny. A keyboard can be had for $10, but his is priced at between $70 and $100 per sale. It's not because it's novel, it's because he had to have that price to actually make any money in the small market he's chosen.

      --
      My present is the activity I am currently engaged in with the purpose of turning the future into a better past.
    5. Re:target market by __aaqvdr516 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I really hope that there are only about 5 people in your office, or else it seems like your company is employing morons.

      Yeah. All those people who can't type are such morons. They're just as bad as the people who don't compile their own stuff from source. It's just so easy and useful in everyday life.

  3. Just had a look at the Decatxt keyboard... by blind+biker · · Score: 4, Funny

    Man, that thing looks like it was sent directly from Hell by Satan himself.

    As such, it would become the mandatory input device for Windows 8.. and Unity.

    --
    "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
    1. Re:Just had a look at the Decatxt keyboard... by blind+biker · · Score: 2

      On the bright side, it will now be possible to drop your keyboard in the toilet.

      Possible? More like mandatory.

      --
      "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
  4. Somebody pissed in the editor's Corn Flakes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow...no need to be nasty.

    There may have been many chording keyboards on the market over the past decades, but clearly nobody has really gotten the design right. There's plenty of demand in the industrial/commercial/warehouse/field work markets for good one-handed data entry. Nothing has stuck.

    This guy is trying. Maybe he has figured out the magicsauce. He probably hasn't. Either way, there's no need for Slashdot editors to be total dicks about it.

  5. Don't bother complaining about patents... by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...unless you're going to at least bother to track down the patent in question and link to it, so we can decide for ourselves whether anything in it is interesting. I would guess there is more to it than just the basic idea of chording.

    1. Re:Don't bother complaining about patents... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Google Patent search returned this on the inventor's name:
      http://www.google.com/patents/US6542091

  6. braille keyboard by vlm · · Score: 2

    Maybe we're just jaded. Or maybe we've known a lot of blind people who used one-handed Braille chording keyboards to type as fast with one hand as a sighted person using a QWERTY keyboard and two hands.

    OK I'll bite how does that work? I know the braille system is 2x3 grid aka 6 bits ... and you claim there is a one handed keyboard, so I'm optimistically giving you 4 fingers and a thumb. In between I wonder how the protocol encoding works. It would be a heck of a lot simple if we had 7 or so fingers on each hand, or braille was just merely morse code. If I were inventing my own system I'd totally use two hands and one bit for pointer, middle, and ring fingers on each finger and probably either thumb as "clock signal". Or maybe rather than momentary keys the keys are little J/K toggle flipflops or S/R flipflops. Maybe two fingers pointer/middle in a three cycle mode where hitting the thumb advances?

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    1. Re:braille keyboard by CastrTroy · · Score: 2

      Not sure how a braille keyboard works but even if it required 2 or 3 keystrokes to do each braille character, it still wouldn't be that difficult to surpass the speed of a lot of people who can't be bothered to learn how to touch type properly. You could design such a system where pressing a key without the thumb depressed puts dots (controlled by the three middle fingers) in the first column of the letter, and with the thumb depressed puts the dots for the second character. Then use the little finger to advance to the next character. You could even auto-advance after typing in the dots for the second column.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  7. Re:Ok... by cristiroma · · Score: 3, Funny

    I've spent the last 30 minutes looking for a video of someone actually USING this stuff instead of just explaining the layout. Guess what? Nada ... I say crap!

  8. Those who ignore history... by jandrese · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Theoretically these chord keyboards would allow someone to work one-handed and use their other hand for something else, but in practice typing takes too much brainpower to really split your attention anyway and these chord keyboards just increase the load on your brain. In the end it seems that most people with a lot of practice can get 50-75% of their normal typing speed with these, which is just sort of annoying when you could just use a regular keyboard and get 100% and then shift both hands over to whatever other task you need to do.

    There might be a few niche markets for these products, but historically they have never been able to sustain a product. It just takes too much training for mediocre results. There's too much compromise inherent in the product.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
  9. Meh... by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Handeykey's product destroys this one hard.

    http://www.handykey.com/

    Keyboard and mouse in one... leaves the other hand completely free for......

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  10. Good piano-style chording keyboards? by cruff · · Score: 2

    I've always thought a piano-style chording keyboard for the desk would be nice, having musical training. In the past, I've not seen any that caught my fancy. I do have an older Twiddler, but that version didn't appear to be quite usable for me due to a restriction on the modifier keys that could be generated.