I tucked this away earlier with intent to respond when I had time, which is now. Your idea is OK, Keith, but in the world of Kinects, I imagine the next generation machine ought to look something like this: a little box that drops comfortably in your pocket like a cell phone, with some sort of a little arm that unfolds so the unit sits on a surface with the arm sticking about 8" up. Generally done on a plain white surface maybe 14" square, but that's flexible, and the machine adapts to what it finds. The top of the arm has a projector, firing rgb laser light down onto the sheet. It draws a nice big keyboard, and watches how you place your fingers, providing audio feedback as you type on the surface. The keyboard uses the near part of the surface, the rest of the display is the working output, and it resizes itself to the space available. You can use a dedicated board that folds out to a laptop shape if you want, but it can fend with a white table top. It uses the Kinect-type technology to read your keystrokes, and something similar for mouse funtion, but you can direct the pointer directly on the display surface with your fingertips if you want. Function is as a smartphone-laptop, with all the ancilliary function that entails - gps, ebook, etc.
-Pete On Sat, 7 Jul 2012, Keith Hudson wrote: > We're now getting very close to the mature PC/tablet/smart phone, though it > doesn't have a name yet. Microsoft's Surface, announced with the usual > euphoria a day or two ago, comes closest. But it's still beset with one > problem. It's too large. At around 12" (30cm) x 8" (20cm) it still needs to be > shrunk further so that it's the size of, say, a small paperback: something > that can be comfortably slipped into a packet or handbag but, with the flip of > a lid one way or the other, is equally able to be used as a phone or a PC. > > Unlike Apple, Microsoft have been clever enough to realize that a keyboard is > still necessary on any tablet that claims to be versatile. Even if voice > recognition software becomes far more advanced, able to cope with any dialect > or timbre, we're now moving into a specialized age where the written or typed > word is required to be more precise than ever. It can't always be dictated as > a one-off. But Microsoft have not yet paid as much attention to the keyboard > as they have done elsewhere in their machine. > > The problem is our finger-tips. They're too wide. Thus we still require a > keyboard that's at least 10" (25 cm) wide in order to accommodate everything > we need. Otherwise, we'd be pressing two or even three keys at once more often > than not unless we slowed down to snail pace. But we don't need the keys to be > the size of fingertips. > > If Microsoft had some biologists among their researchers then they might have > solved this problem because Nature has already done it. True, it's in the > visual department and not the tactile. At any one instant of time our eyes see > only a small 2 degree cone of sharp vision before they flick elsewhere. > Perception tails off steeply outside the cone. Why not the same for sharply > sensitized pressure pads? With a smaller keyboard of about 8" (200 cm) we'd > always be impinging on two or three keys but if it responded only to a very > small cone in the centre of each jab even the clumsiest person among us would > soon learn to type each letter unambiguously. > > There we are then. I've solved the next step for Apple or Microsoft, or Nokia > or any other manufacturer. What's more, by writing this I've prevented any of > them claiming copyright and perhaps monopolizing the innovation for years to > come as corporations are wont to do. > > I'm now going to make a request that I've never made before. Could each of you > publicise this posting among other lists (or key contacts) as widely as you > can? I would like to make sure that the idea is well and truly within the > public domain if it is, in fact, successful. Thank you. > > Keith > > Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com > _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
