Pete,
Thanks for your feedback. I didn't know what Kinects was until I
looked it up in Wikipedia. However, reading your posting took me back
some 30/35 years to an idea I'd discussed with Toshiba (I think it
was -- can't remember precisely). At that time, a friend of mine was
much taken with a new keypad device that NEC was trying to sell. It
was a small single-hand pad with ten or so keys which had to be
pressed in various combinations, rather like playing a chord on the
piano. I started to learn this, but when I realized just how many
combinations one would have to learn I gave up and went back to the
QWERTY keyboard. Besides, although I was, (and am) a two-finger
typist I was still far quicker than my friend who'd spent months
learning the NEC technique. I then thought: Why not an imaginary
QWERTY keyboard sitting in the air above the PC (or micro-processor
as they were called in those days) and activated by means of
reflected infra-red from the fingertips? I wrote to various
manufacturers and when the research director of Toshiba was over here
on a visit he invited me to have a chat with him. Nothing came of it
and I'd forgotten all about it since then until reading your piece.
(Thinking back to it, it would have required vast computational power
which was not available then. Perhaps that's what he told me but I
can't remember.)
I like your idea. I think that something similar to yours or mine
will come along before too long. I'm particularly interested in such
a device because I'll be confined to bed before too long and in the
time remaining to me would still like to type with a decent amount of
text area on the screen (which the present iPad doesn't offer).
Keith
At 02:02 11/07/2012, you wrote:
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
>
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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