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1000-key Emoji Keyboard Is As Crazy As It Sounds
hypnosec writes: A YouTuber named Tom Scott has built a 1,000-key keyboard with each key representing an emoji! Scott made the emoji keyboard using 14 keyboards and over 1,000 individually placed stickers. While he himself admits that it is one of the craziest things he has built, the work he has put in does warrant appreciation. On the keyboard are individually placed emojis for food items, animals, plants, transport, national flags, and time among others.
Why? What's there to appreciate? A tremendous waste of time and effort? :)
Is that the Unicode Consortium is wasting 1000s of code points on emojis.
Sure, some of them are nice. But there's such a thing as going too far.
I appreciate all the free time he has compared to myself.
alternate link
http://kotaku.com/guy-builds-c...
Tom's videos on CS subjects are really good too. Check his youtube channel!
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
Now if only one of those OLED keyboards would actually come out at a reasonable price, you could do it all in the same space.
One day. One day someone will decide to mass produce them.
I guess we have an igNobel nominee right there.
I feel crackberry beating a path to his door.
Requiem for the American Dream
It's....a gigantic keyboard. For...communicating entirely in emoticons....? I think?
(It's slashdotted, so can't RTFA, but I feel like I'm too old to get this anyway)
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Agreed. At first when I read the title I was thinking Asian languages. But what in the world is this doing on slashdot? A dozen keyboards on a table all hooked up to a laptop, and all to print variations of :) and :( ...
Aren't many emoji combinations or modifications of other emoji? I seem to recall this was done (for among other reasons) to accommodate different skin colors and such?
This was the best I could find after a bunch of googling:
http://www.unicode.org/reports...
Please help metamoderate.
By the time you find the right emoji, you already forgot what you wanted to .... uhm ....
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Why not just assign 2 emojis per key, and use Shift/Caps Lock to toggle between the sets? He could have used 1/2 the hardware and 1/2 the space.
I've generally stuck with the whole "well if he learned something, it wasn't a waste" line of thinking. I try doubly so when it's something where can't suss out its usefulness, give them the benefit of the doubt. But no, this is fucking stupid and emoji's are fucking stupid. All I see when I look at them is the hospital diagnostics board from Idiocracy.
Agreed, what a waste of time.. He created something that has no practical purpose..outside of his own amusement .
That's what I was thinking.
Western languages with alphabets around the common 26-letter model construct concepts by grouping letters into words and then words into sentences. Eastern languages with logograms like Hanzi or Kanji can have their logograms 'built' as they can be reduced to a combination of particular strokes that when put together create a specific meaning, so in effect, keyboards for Eastern logograms can be assembled through keystrokes in a fashion similarly to how they're drawn through brush strokes.
This Emoji keyboard is silly, especially as a form of logogram, Emojis only contain so many varieties of each type of characteristic. That's why we used to type them on our keyboards using ASCII or extended ASCII, because we could represent the expression without having to have a specific icon for it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That's the first range of code points in UTF that needs to be officially retracted, and whoever thought it would be a good idea to add that nonsense overhead to a standard that needs to be understood and handled by practically every computerized system in the world should be banned from doing standards work and deserves a good flogging at the very least. Fucking idiots!
Wouldn't it be easier to have a touch pad and toggle through all the different emoji sets???
Karma: Bad
Direct youtube link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Because that's what you were looking for anyway.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOO! MOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU EMOJI COWS!!
It was called 'non-simplified Chinese'.
Why? What's there to appreciate? A tremendous waste of time and effort? :)
Why? See, right there you used an emoticon. It took you two whole keystrokes.
Tom could have typed it with one!
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Idiocracy predicts the future again...
You can't handle the truth.
The keyboard is a crazy joke if you are into that kind of thing.
What is really crazy is that these stupid symbols are being encoded into unicode.
Which I suspect is the pint he was trying to make.
The human race is regressing back to communicating with silly pictures scribbled upon a digital wall.
A visual demonstration of the sillyness and pointlessness of emoji.
I've never used one. Why would I? I have words and, on occasion, an old-fashioned ascii smiley :>
(Why the >? Look at the name. That's why.)
Tom Scott released today a 'making of' video describing how he made it. and tech 'bodging' in general.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIFE7h3m40U
And here is a direct link to his original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AtBE9BOvvk
Use facial recognition to map current facial expression to emoji :-)
love is just extroverted narcissism
He was so preoccupied with whether or not he could that he didn't stop to think if he should.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Looks like it's just a bunch of non-modified keyboards (except for adding stickers) taking up X times a usual workspace. From the description it sounded like there was more to it. Maybe there's more info in the slashdotted and unreadable link, but overall seems like it's =[.
I was thinking he may have actually hacked together a bunch of 104 keys to create a giant 1000 key keyboard. This is boring. It's 14 keyboards plugged into a USB hub, some "fancy software", and key mapping.
Precisely. A paragon of inefficiency. But it's still kinda fun.
Well, it looks like he didn't even really make a keyboard, he just took some existing ones, put emoji stickers on them, and then remapped their buttons to emojis through whatever means. I thought it would have been something like this.
It's a BOMB!
But it would have taken him ten minutes to find the key.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Which is true, if you're limiting yourself to Western European languages. If you limit yourself to English, you can get rid of silly accented characters too.
The reason for the Emoji entering our lives really stems from Apple trying to be universal. The history of Emoji is that it comes from Japan, as Japanese carriers sought to differentiate themselves by adding little pictograms. Of course, Apple had to bring their iPhone to Japan, which mean Apple needed to support Emoji as well (and for a little while, the Emoji keyboard was Japan-only)
Emoji really entered our space when it was discovered that we can't represent Japanese text with Emoji in Unicode. It was not possible to convert because Unicode was lacking the Emoji codepoints to which you could convert to.
Which is why Unicode added a pile of Emoji - because the goal of Unicode is to be able to universally represent text - and Emoji was text that couldn't be converted to or from Unicode.
hahaha, exactly!
But still, fewer keystrokes! Like the fewer clicks that most Linux users on Slashdot measure their desktop efficiency by, regardless of whether it means visually searching through nested menus. By this logic, the ten minutes is much easier and more intuitive than pressing an extra key. This should be the new default keyboard for Linux users.
Bah! A true hacker would have done it using a chorded keyboard!
...that's achieved through efficient design. This is not efficient design. You're confusing the UI's of Unix with DOS.
Dealing with n+1 keyboards is hardly efficient. Once you've created something suitably flexible for 2015, then such a
a single suitable programmable keyboard could have the most often used emoji on the "default page" ONE keyboard. Much better than mucking around with n+1 them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Self-amusement can't be a practical purpose for a hobby project?
:-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I would have been more impressed if he had instead of used stickers, had programmed the emoji to be displayed on the key itself using a programmable keyboard.
The problem is that emojis are now purely grahics ... and generally things people expect you're going to download to your phone.
So when someone wants to have "Christmas tree, Christmas tree, Budweiser, Pizza, rabid weasel, rabid weasel, rabid weasel" ... the expectation is you've downloaded these from somewhere, and if you send this crap to your friends, they'll also download it.
It now has nothing to do with the smileys it started from, and has turned into something which seems quite different.
If someone texts me with a bunch of random emojis, I'm going to get blanks, because I don't give a crap enough to download all of your stupid little emojis.
I'm afraid I simply don't see the point of them other than appealing to a bunch of teenagers who think they're cute.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'm just going to wait until everyone gets used to finding their emojis on this keyboard and then design the Dvorak emoji keyboard so you guys can fight about it.
re: This Emoji keyboard is silly
with that many emojis who needs alpha numeric symbols?
Same.
And the guy looks really proud! C'mon, someone please. drop the H bomb! I cannot stand this world anymore.
Self-amusement can't be a practical purpose for a hobby project?
It's one of those things we couldn't have imagined when the Internet was thrown open to anyone back in the early 90s. We didn't anticipate it would be used to spread cat memes, revive white supremacist ideology, or more to the point usher in a new golden age or priggery.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Linux people don't measure their productivity by "clicks", they measure by real productivity. How long does it take me to perform X task on Y computers, or how fast can I automate X task for Y computers. You Windows xenophobes just can't comprehend doing very much without your mouse.
I get it, and fully understand that we are different. You like to open Explorer and click through menus and objects until you find what you want. Good for you! I prefer to type it. In *nix my method is always faster than the GUI. Windows made working with CLI difficult intentionally, so in Windows you will almost always work faster in the GUI.
Now to your asinine statement above, they two are not even close to related. Imagine having to open character map and search through 1,000 little icons to find what you need. That is this 1,000 key keyboard. Whereas normally you and I would use the same keyboard and have the same ease in finding things due to familiarity and consistency.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Uh, people that want only around a hundred keys to have to choose from in order to type quickly?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Hey it's been slashdotted! That hasn't happened in years! Congratz guys!
The point is exactly the same as in any other text-based communication system that also includes images -- like books and newspapers and web pages and twitter and science journals -- to provide flexibility in conveying information beyond what ASCII allows.
You don't have to like or use them, but choosing to avoid understanding them will only hurt you in the end.
Why would I want a black santa?
Is there a spacebar-sized key for the poop emoji? My daughter uses that one the most, by far.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Does it have the 'Any' key ?
Brings new meaning to the term 'hunt and peck'.
Sorry I can't stop. Where's the stop key ?
But it would have taken him ten minutes to find the key.
Unless he remapped it to the 1000-key Dvorak Emoji layout.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
640keys is more than enough!
I would suggest the number of views his YouTube video will get will make this well worth it. And good for him.
Self-amusement can't be a practical purpose for a hobby project?
It's one of those things we couldn't have imagined when the Internet was thrown open to anyone back in the early 90s. We didn't anticipate it would be used to spread cat memes, revive white supremacist ideology, or more to the point usher in a new golden age or priggery.
You meant of priggery, moron!
Nah, just kidding, it amused me to prove your point (which I agree with).
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Cut him some slack, will you?
It is obvious that Tom did this pretty much useless hack to amuse himself and, maybe, to hint at the total waste of resources the emoji concept leads to.
Tom is a really nice and interesting guy, he doesn't deserve the bleating his kludge produced here, on /.
What I use every day is nowhere near as extreme, but it is conceptually similar. Basically I took a Cherry point-of-sale programmable keyboard and physically removed five of the eight rows of keys, then glued it to the back end of another, stock POS keyboard. I have changed the key labels for ones with a bit more useful color-coding, and swapped the positions of Escape and `~, but otherwise this setup has been stable for months now, after several months of daily-to-weekly refactoring.
To get tons of usable symbols, I have mapped four to each key on the "backplane" part. Lower left is unshifted, upper left is shifted, lower right is Ctrl+key, and upper right is Alt+key. I also have less commonly used symbols defined in a large AutoHotkey script of my own creation. (I know Windows is unpopular around here, but it's what I use, and AHK is the right tool for this job.) I can -- and frequently do -- type accented characters or ones resembling composite characters via hotstrings, as well as Unicode symbols. If you want to know what's in my list, why not go directly to the source and look? Anyone is welcome to modify and redistribute as they see fit, provided you don't try to do something malicious and blame it on me.
The macro keys are defined on a per-application basis, but labeled with their functions in GVOX Encore, since that is by far the most complex usage I put them to. Even the blue Ctrl+letter keys are occasionally "stolen" for specific purposes, if that key combination has no effect in a given app ordinarily. These assignments are not in the script linked above.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
When I read the title I thought it was going to be a 1000 character emoji. What a bummer.
For 12 year old girls. Who don't use keyboards!
Fourteen keyboards can be combined to make a big keyboard with 1000 keys? What kind of keyboards did he start out with?
...because I don't give a crap enough to download all of your stupid little emojis.
Emoji's are part of Unicode/UTF-8. They work like any other character, like the ones you're reading now. When I enter "N", you may see it in Times New Roman, Arial, or whatever you have your fonts set to, so it might not look the same as what I see, but it's still a capitalized 14th letter of the english alphabet. Similarly, when someone sends you a smiling cat emoji, it's just a character code, and your system/font may or may not display it the same as their system, or may not display it at all.
Long story short, people aren't sending you pictures, and you're not downloading pictures**.
** exception to this rule is the "stickers" feature in Google Hangouts and similar stuff. Those are pictures, not emoji, though the files themselves are not sent whenever you send them (they use something similar to & to send them).
Hey, I'm not looking to buy such a keyboard any time soon, and I agree, he probably wasted his time. But it was his time to waste.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Which is true, if you're limiting yourself to Western European languages.
I limit myself to languages I can speak so, yeah, I'm fairly limiting myself by only speaking the one I guess.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Sorry. Can hear you over the deafening roar of Internet tutting.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
An amusing demonstration of the superiority of approximately phonetic alphabets over approximately pictographic ones? :)
I kid, but at the same time I'm rather glad that I never had to learn a gazillion pictograms. English may not be perfect, and the spelling conventions may be a bizarre (if fascinating and occasionally informative) historical accident, but at least there are only 26 characters and a handful of numbers and symbols involved. I'm sure those who grew up with Chinese characters or similar would hold precisely the opposite view.
(regarding TFA: I can appreciate the cool factor. It's like a nixie clock or one of those useless boxes that only switch themselves off - fun for its own sake with no other justification needed)
EXACTLY what I was thinking. It still would have been pretty useless, but at least it would have been something. He didn't even the keyboards out of their plastic shells to put into one big shell... they're just sitting on a table! WTF. And he "programmed" something so they'd all work? Bullshit. He configured the keyboard remapping. That's not programming, it's configuring a program.
I was actually hoping it'd show how to make a custom keyboard layout - I could probably find a use for a small one (maybe a row of keys to put on the front side of my desk, which is above my keyboard tray, so I can reach up with a finger and poke some volume/media/etc type of keys)
I get it that the geek dislikes the alleged "inefficiency:' of languages that are inherently and compellingly pictographic. But his objections to the use of the humble emoji to enliven conversations over what can still be very pricey low bandwidth connections makes no sense.
The rebus is four centuries old in the western world; typographic art and the emoticon as old the printing press. When Unicode opens the door to greater fun and play in the use of language and pictures, I am all for it.
I think this is cool, but the who created this should use his smartness to event things that actually gives real value to people's lives...
Oh, right: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_17Dt...
But what in the world is this doing on slashdot?
It fits right in: Slashdot - News for turds, stuff that doesn't matter.
Oh, come on - it is just a bit of fun, of course it is silly. They guy isn't suggesting it was anything else. And in the process of making it all work, he has probably learned a lot of useful stuff, such as developing an idea, persisting with a project that was probably quite tedious at times, not to mention having to understand how keyboards work and how their data are transmitted and processed at the receiving end. There is a lot of this project that I find positive; don't be such a wet blanket.
As for 'Eastern languages' - what is normally called CJK (China, Japan and Korea) character sets: they are all input into computers using input methods. Off the top of my head, I can only recall one that I think is derived from strokes, plus a small number of handwriting recognition systems; the rest are based on transcription into ASCII. Popular input methods systems on the Linux desktop are SCIM, XIM and fcitx; have a look at them if you're interested.
Quite sure this dude makes a living from youtube vids under the "computerphile". This is just part of his "job". Whether he uses the keyboard or not, he gets paid from ad impressions from everyone looking at his videos.
Hey, I'm not looking to buy such a keyboard any time soon, and I agree, he probably wasted his time. But it was his time to waste.
Obviouly, but that doesn't mean slashdot has to waste our time on it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Christmas tree, Christmas tree, Budweiser, Pizza, rabid weasel, rabid weasel, rabid weasel
Sounds like the call sign of a Special Forces team on acid.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
(slashdot can't into UTF8, so this'll have to do:)
U+1F524 INPUT SYMBOL FOR LATIN LETTERS
U+1F51B ON WITH EXCLAMATION MARK WITH LEFT RIGHT ARROW ABOVE
U+1F4D6 OPEN BOOK
U+1F62A SLEEPY FACE
U+1F5A7 THREE NETWORKED COMPUTERS
U+261C WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX
U+1F63A SMILING CAT FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH
U+1F44D THUMBS UP
U+1F192 SQUARED COOL
Is that the one that puts the five most commonly used emojis in the home row under one hand? :-) :-( :-P ;-) >:(