I wonder how accurate it will be.. For general typing, there is probably some built-in autocorrect, but, if you wanted to code, I wonder how that would work.. Exciting anyway.
I really want a portable keyboard that I can type on quickly while walking around, but I don't think these guys have anything like a product. This looks like an empty web page to measure interest.
From what it looks like, the founders didn't submit it to HN. For all we know, this page was thrown together as somewhere they can direct people who ask them what they are working on, not somewhere they are actively trying to drum up interest with (if they had nothing beyond what the page shows, my guess is they would have gone with a Kickstarter, rather than just an email capture).
That's what I'm hunting for as well; have been for the past few days. Something like BlueTwiddler ( http://hewner.com/programming/ ) is pretty much perfect for me, but it was never commercialized. I'm thinking about picking up http://theperegrine.com/ , adding Bluetooth support, and turning it into essentially a chording keyboard for wearable computers. I need something that will let me type on Glass, the Epson Moverio, and my phone with ease. I'm hoping in the next year that I'll be able to ditch non-wearable computers, from an interface perspective (I'll still have them for heavy lifting, of course).
The Peregrine looks to be the most promising platform for this kind of input. The only limitation I've seen is you need the finger dexterity of a guitar player to quickly and accurately type that way. Then again, the only other solution I've seen is the four button spiffchorder[0] and a trackball in the other hand. I don't like those only because you can't do anything else with your hands while you're using them.
I think this is going in the wrong direction. Tactile feedback is so crucial for keyboards and this just completely removes it. In my opinion, technologies like the morphing touchscreen keyboard[1] are the future.
Neither. Truth is we are a generation that grew up using keyboards. The one coming after us will consider normal to use an onscreen keyboard or voice recognition. This is a problem that will solve itself.
No. Humans depend on feedback loops to coordinate their fine motor movements. Otherwise absolute positioning accuracy is bad. Even an on-screen keyboard provides such feedback. Typing in the air doesn't.
No, a table gives no feedback whatsoever in the manner that he's referring to at least. When you hit a key on a keyboard the key sinks into the board, you have a positive 'strike'. If you miss the key slightly then it feels different and you'll know before the wrong letter appears - this is what is meant by a feedback loop.
With an on-screen keyboard, you get visual feedback seeing your fingers land relative to the keys, even if you don't give tactile feedback. With this, all you see is whether you got the letter right.
Voice is a separate issue, but this has the same problem as a touchscreen. We are very sensitive to touch. It's quite possible that with the proliferation of touchscreens, children may find increasingly less tactile feedback in the world around them (due to various other reasons - less play time, sterilized playgrounds, etc) and we could end up with a generation of adults lacking the same tactile ability we have today.
So I don't think the problem solves itself, it just compounds.
Much like our loss of movement ability, it seems to become less relevant, until you notice that we've lost an essential part of what makes us human.
Its about time computers started fitting humans and not the other way round.
> Its about time computers started fitting humans and not the other way round.
This is a really interesting argument and has got me thinking. I have to say that I agree with your sentiment. The problem is that I think we've entered into a kind of feedback loop; a compounding problem as you described it.
Technology and intelligence have allowed us to rapidly accelerate our fitness while simultaneously and subtly forcing us to become increasingly dependent upon them for continued advancement. In short, tech informs the ways in which we progress and, in the interest of further progress, our new (less human?) norms inform the progression of tech.
I think there are examples of this all over the place: infants expressing confusion at a screen that is not touch sensitive, memes and texting idioms seeping into spoken conversation, or people asking their device to call someone and intentionally mispronouncing the name the same way the device does so that it "understands."
But I also disagree that tech can start fitting humans in the sense you describe, because I simply don't think that's possible anymore.
There's a post on the front page right now discussing self-experimentation with black widow bites, a comment from which [0] strikes me as relevant to the argument I'm about to make. To quote, "[humans]...are pretty weak creatures all things considered." A lot of cutting edge tech today is focused on AR and mobility. That's because, as the quoted comment notes, humans are weak; a weakness which also extends to our senses. Touch seems so fundamentally human, yet a computerized sensor can tell us so much more than a fingertip about a surface. It sounds terrible when I write it, but there it is: information is powerful (addicting?).
It's impossible for us to conceive the kinds of situations humanity will face in the future, but after a certain point the limitations of the human body will have to be addressed. Right now that means computers.
So, I suppose what I'm saying is that, imho, computers actually are fitting "humans," it's just that they are fitting what we have, will and must continue to become rather than what we once were. And that's probably a good bad thing (rather than bad bad) in the long run.
Computers are fitting humans, thats why they are now a thin slate you can easily carry around.
And there is a feedback when you touch a glass surface, it's just it doesn't give you a non-visual clue that you have pressed a letter and that you have grown accustomed to.
I don't think that's a dealbreaker for the generation that is growing with tablets. I certainly don't see my teeneage cousins or nephews/nieces worried at all about using keyboards. If they have them around they might use them but they type fast on the screens as well. Most of them no longer have a laptop or desktop anyway. I've seen them writing whole essays on the phone while lying on the bed.
Talking about lost feedback, think about what a huge step back was for our grandfathers generation to abandon handwriting and switch to pressing keys on a typewriter. I'm pretty sure we could have argue back then about how little feedback you get from a key vs. the flow of the hand and the friction of the paper when you write. And somehow we adjusted so well that most of us are probably incapable of writing a handwritten letter nowadays. We are not "less human" because of this.
We will survive.
And note I'm not trying to say that this is the new status quo and we should all accept it and move along. I'm sure we will see a lot of different approaches to solve the issue in the future. What I'm saying is that the pool of users these solutions speak to is diminishing. We see this ideas and think that they'll appeal to everybody who uses a tablet. Most likely they'll be only used by a niche market. Nothing wrong with that but definitely something to take into account when trying to launch a company around them.
That's where machine learning plays a role. It learns what movement corresponds to a particular letter. If that movement changes over time, it learns that too.
I think there are some keys that I couldn't reliably hit without a quick glance at what I'm aiming for. It's a reliable phenomenon that expert typists can't tell you where many keys are, so I'm curious how I'd fare when I need to hit the ^ or & symbols and can't look down.
If it works well, the demand is there, but we all know that, don't we?
The question is whether it works well in real use, and no landing page can show that. I can likewise put up an email subscription page for a $20k flying car.
Making this product work 50% of the time takes some serious work, but making it work the 99.5% of the time which would make it qualify as a keyboard replacement is something else entirely.
I wouldn't waste potential customers time with a landing page like that, and their video is downright insulting. Spend your time and resources making something that works instead.
Anyway, with all the buzz around hardware startups, I would expect more landing pages like this to crop up. People simply don't realize how difficult making good tangibles is, but they will find out soon enough.
Agree completely, just wanted to point out that 99.5% accuracy would mean 5 typos within the length of your comment. For any significant amount of typing it would need to be way more accurate. But then again, all this thing really is is a super-charged autocorrect, so they could probably fix those errors.
People who type a lot may be interested in moving away from the keyboard-and-screen model for ergonomic reasons. "This is how you don't fuck up your body while working" is a lot stronger selling point than "Wouldn't not carrying a keyboard with your tablet be nice?"
People who type a lot are likely to be working with some level of jargon (variable names for programmers, macros and cell codes for data analysts, etc.) rather than the pure prose autocorrect is designed for.
AFAIK, there aren't any good demos of autocorrecting keyboards for technical domains. That said, TextMate's autocomplete works pretty well most of the time. If you could seed the autospell dictionary with a combination of language-specific keywords and the variables that have already been defined in your project (ala TextMate), that could be pretty powerful for technical people trying to be productive with alternate input methods.
I am not sure of that. This might be fueled by a lot of negativity, but many people I know care 0 about ergonomic reasons, even if it fucks up their body while working. Chair too low, not configured, table not at the correct height, although easily changeable... I could go on.
Also, I am not sure how this thing makes anything better: you still have to do hand movements correctly and most people will need some kind of surface to orient their hands on. Same problem, without a keyboard.
I've worked with a few of the mentors, as well as Capital Factory and Longhorn Startup, and it definitely seemed obvious to me that UT has some fantastically talented hardware engineers around there. Lynx Labs is one of the cooler hardwares I've seen in person, and it was built by students there.
I really hope they can handle chorded keystrokes if they want folks like programmers to use it.
Also, while tablets are an obvious starting position, perhaps consoles would be another good arena - having to lean over to type on that wireless keyboard in order to chat or enter detailed text seems more intrusive than just typing it out using AT.
Hmm, Dave Rosenthal suggested such a keyboard when the first accelerometers came out, basically put one on each finger tip and 'train' it by your typing on your regular keyboard, 'use' it by making some gesture and then typing. His concept though counted on 8 3DOF accelerometers per hand (5 on the fingers, one on either side of the palm and one on the wrist. The sketch showed something like fingerless biking gloves that had blobs and wires attached to your fingernails.
I'm not sure if it goes past the proposal stage however, the folks who were researching those sorts of issues were at UC Berkeley in the late 80's so that would be a good place for a literature search.
If this can be built and be as reliable as a keyboard (and I make mistakes/miss keys on my keyboard too) it could be really really useful. At some point, something like this and something like Glass will be a 'terminal' to the internet. The Myo folks have some interesting ideas in this space too, not clear if they get the fidelity they need through the upper arm though.
I didn't watch the video, just the screenshots. I would seem that this device uses EEG like sensors to measure muscle activity and map it back to the activated fingers. Nearly the same as the thalmic device.
And I know I am (not) being paranoid, but imagine how excited NSAs of the world all will be! A new kind of keyboard, that has capabilities to understand and predict what the user will write? This just looks like something Facebook could also be interested into (if you think at their "I keep what you wrote and deleted before even publishing" attitude).
This kind of tool really needs to be open source and open hardware. Otherwise they better stay far away from me.
This kind of cynicism is getting tiring. Being cautious about your personal information is good, but how exactly is this any worse than a bluetooth keyboard? OS X and iOS already have predictive typing with regular keyboards. There is no need for FUD.
Predictive typing for single words is usually based on a locally stored dictionary, and for sentences it can be done with a model like prediction by partial matching. The device functionality is similar to a system used for speech recognition, in that better accuracy would only be gained by sending motion and text data to the cloud at the very least in the training stage and then aggregate and analyse data using a prediction model.
However, no-one seems to care that most voice recognition tools like Siri nowadays send and store data on servers, and nearly all those aren't OSS.
This isn't cynicism. It is the new reality we live in. We now have to look at every piece of technology we buy and do a risk analysis to see how it could leak our data. It isn't just the NSA. It is also hackers who are after our data. Having a breach, especially by the latter, is a painful mistake that can ruin your credit and turn your life upside down for decades to come.
Why risk it, open one more door to a security violation, so you can type in the air. No thanks.
Could this work as a piano keyboard? That would be way more useful for me since I usually have a physical keyboard (laptop) but I can't really carry around a midi one.
I actually think this is pretty brilliant, have the hand parts hook up to some ear buds and plug them into your ears, any place your at you can practice piano.
Piano hand movements would most likely also be easier for the software to reliably track, and some people might like the gimmickry of "air keyboards" for live performance
Seems to me like it is a more user friendly approach no physical feedback and no visual sounds like AirType is a power user tool. And my Das keyboard lover friends who have blank layout would hate the lack of physical feedback.
I've come close to buying one but I can't help but wonder how painful it's going to be on my fingers. My keyboard keys have nice padded, spring like qualities. My desk however is waiting to draw blood from my finger tips after a days coding...
I received one of these as a gift once. Played around with it for 2 minutes, then never used it again.
The main issue I had with it was that you had to 'hunt and peck' in order for it to register. Merely sliding your fingers around like on a standard keyboard would just register errant keystrokes.
Also, resting your palms had the same keyboard-mashing effect. It was cool to show off to others, but totally impractical for real use.
I don't see myself ever replacing a real keyboard for this, at least not for long typing sessions (being tactile is the most appreciated aspect of a keyboard for me).
But there is absolutely a huge demand out there for this. Not to mention that other applications for it may appear (other than just replacing traditional QWERTY keyboards).
But in the end the question is the same: how good it is?
Anyone got a video showing it working (other than just the concept)?
And then I go to shake somebodies hand/ wave to somebody / hold a sandwich and I have this thing stuck to my hand.
Edit: Might be different if it wasn't so hard, big (across my whole hand), and plasticy. Gloves and rings don't seem to cause much trouble during day to day activities.
So it appears that you have to keep your fingers elevated off of the surface, and then strike down similar to a touch screen?
The best part about a mechanical keyboard is that you can rest your hand on the keys. I've actually never tried a MS Surface touch cover, but something like that without actual segmented keys might be best. Sort of like a touch cover and Fleksy hybrid.
I don't know... This won't be as accurate as we want it. No matter what they use. I tried making a similar prototype using motion sensors, muscle sensors, neural network. But the thing is, a keyboard is just alot of possibilities for anything like that to predict. Plus, no feedback means our motion will be whole lot different than on normal keyboard.
110 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] thread[0] http://chorder.cs.vassar.edu/spiffchorder/forside
I wouldn't be surprised if the same algorithms they developed can be adapted to myoelectric sensors (if they haven't done so already).
It's still just prototypes, but sounds like someone is working on just what you ask about.
[1] http://tactustechnology.com/
Seriously, wouldn't that be the same amount of feedback as a touchscreen keyboard? Flat, and you get the wrong letter when you miss?
> Even an on-screen keyboard provides such feedback. Typing in the air doesn't.
Probably there.
So I don't think the problem solves itself, it just compounds.
Much like our loss of movement ability, it seems to become less relevant, until you notice that we've lost an essential part of what makes us human.
Its about time computers started fitting humans and not the other way round.
This is a really interesting argument and has got me thinking. I have to say that I agree with your sentiment. The problem is that I think we've entered into a kind of feedback loop; a compounding problem as you described it.
Technology and intelligence have allowed us to rapidly accelerate our fitness while simultaneously and subtly forcing us to become increasingly dependent upon them for continued advancement. In short, tech informs the ways in which we progress and, in the interest of further progress, our new (less human?) norms inform the progression of tech.
I think there are examples of this all over the place: infants expressing confusion at a screen that is not touch sensitive, memes and texting idioms seeping into spoken conversation, or people asking their device to call someone and intentionally mispronouncing the name the same way the device does so that it "understands."
But I also disagree that tech can start fitting humans in the sense you describe, because I simply don't think that's possible anymore.
There's a post on the front page right now discussing self-experimentation with black widow bites, a comment from which [0] strikes me as relevant to the argument I'm about to make. To quote, "[humans]...are pretty weak creatures all things considered." A lot of cutting edge tech today is focused on AR and mobility. That's because, as the quoted comment notes, humans are weak; a weakness which also extends to our senses. Touch seems so fundamentally human, yet a computerized sensor can tell us so much more than a fingertip about a surface. It sounds terrible when I write it, but there it is: information is powerful (addicting?).
It's impossible for us to conceive the kinds of situations humanity will face in the future, but after a certain point the limitations of the human body will have to be addressed. Right now that means computers.
So, I suppose what I'm saying is that, imho, computers actually are fitting "humans," it's just that they are fitting what we have, will and must continue to become rather than what we once were. And that's probably a good bad thing (rather than bad bad) in the long run.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7860997
And there is a feedback when you touch a glass surface, it's just it doesn't give you a non-visual clue that you have pressed a letter and that you have grown accustomed to.
I don't think that's a dealbreaker for the generation that is growing with tablets. I certainly don't see my teeneage cousins or nephews/nieces worried at all about using keyboards. If they have them around they might use them but they type fast on the screens as well. Most of them no longer have a laptop or desktop anyway. I've seen them writing whole essays on the phone while lying on the bed.
Talking about lost feedback, think about what a huge step back was for our grandfathers generation to abandon handwriting and switch to pressing keys on a typewriter. I'm pretty sure we could have argue back then about how little feedback you get from a key vs. the flow of the hand and the friction of the paper when you write. And somehow we adjusted so well that most of us are probably incapable of writing a handwritten letter nowadays. We are not "less human" because of this.
We will survive.
And note I'm not trying to say that this is the new status quo and we should all accept it and move along. I'm sure we will see a lot of different approaches to solve the issue in the future. What I'm saying is that the pool of users these solutions speak to is diminishing. We see this ideas and think that they'll appeal to everybody who uses a tablet. Most likely they'll be only used by a niche market. Nothing wrong with that but definitely something to take into account when trying to launch a company around them.
Trouch-screen devices are good for content consumption but absolutely unfit compared to computer for content creation.
People are creating high quality keyboards[1] because there is an actual market :-)
[1] http://codekeyboards.com/
It's unfortunate to see it in a product video unattributed (or at all — though I know his music is licensed elsewhere).
[1] http://www.piedpiper.com/
The question is whether it works well in real use, and no landing page can show that. I can likewise put up an email subscription page for a $20k flying car.
Making this product work 50% of the time takes some serious work, but making it work the 99.5% of the time which would make it qualify as a keyboard replacement is something else entirely.
I wouldn't waste potential customers time with a landing page like that, and their video is downright insulting. Spend your time and resources making something that works instead.
Anyway, with all the buzz around hardware startups, I would expect more landing pages like this to crop up. People simply don't realize how difficult making good tangibles is, but they will find out soon enough.
People who type a lot are likely to be working with some level of jargon (variable names for programmers, macros and cell codes for data analysts, etc.) rather than the pure prose autocorrect is designed for.
AFAIK, there aren't any good demos of autocorrecting keyboards for technical domains. That said, TextMate's autocomplete works pretty well most of the time. If you could seed the autospell dictionary with a combination of language-specific keywords and the variables that have already been defined in your project (ala TextMate), that could be pretty powerful for technical people trying to be productive with alternate input methods.
As an aside, “Using Python to code by voice”[0] is quite an inspiring presentation on the topic.
[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI#t=542
Also, I am not sure how this thing makes anything better: you still have to do hand movements correctly and most people will need some kind of surface to orient their hands on. Same problem, without a keyboard.
We do? I don't think I'd replace my keyboard with this even if it worked flawlessly. I like to have tactile feedback when I type.
Also, while tablets are an obvious starting position, perhaps consoles would be another good arena - having to lean over to type on that wireless keyboard in order to chat or enter detailed text seems more intrusive than just typing it out using AT.
Not saying AirType is bad...yet. But I didn't see it working either.
I'm not sure if it goes past the proposal stage however, the folks who were researching those sorts of issues were at UC Berkeley in the late 80's so that would be a good place for a literature search.
If this can be built and be as reliable as a keyboard (and I make mistakes/miss keys on my keyboard too) it could be really really useful. At some point, something like this and something like Glass will be a 'terminal' to the internet. The Myo folks have some interesting ideas in this space too, not clear if they get the fidelity they need through the upper arm though.
Was that conversation and/or those sketches ever published? I didn't find anything in a brief Google Scholar search. They'd be interesting to see.
My first exposure to EMG was in a very low cost eye tracker.
And I know I am (not) being paranoid, but imagine how excited NSAs of the world all will be! A new kind of keyboard, that has capabilities to understand and predict what the user will write? This just looks like something Facebook could also be interested into (if you think at their "I keep what you wrote and deleted before even publishing" attitude).
This kind of tool really needs to be open source and open hardware. Otherwise they better stay far away from me.
However, no-one seems to care that most voice recognition tools like Siri nowadays send and store data on servers, and nearly all those aren't OSS.
I think one of the reasons Jasper [1] was so well received was that it was offline.
[1] http://jasperproject.github.io/
Why risk it, open one more door to a security violation, so you can type in the air. No thanks.
[1] http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-10-12/
Seems to me like it is a more user friendly approach no physical feedback and no visual sounds like AirType is a power user tool. And my Das keyboard lover friends who have blank layout would hate the lack of physical feedback.
The main issue I had with it was that you had to 'hunt and peck' in order for it to register. Merely sliding your fingers around like on a standard keyboard would just register errant keystrokes.
Also, resting your palms had the same keyboard-mashing effect. It was cool to show off to others, but totally impractical for real use.
But there is absolutely a huge demand out there for this. Not to mention that other applications for it may appear (other than just replacing traditional QWERTY keyboards).
But in the end the question is the same: how good it is?
Anyone got a video showing it working (other than just the concept)?
Edit: Might be different if it wasn't so hard, big (across my whole hand), and plasticy. Gloves and rings don't seem to cause much trouble during day to day activities.
The best part about a mechanical keyboard is that you can rest your hand on the keys. I've actually never tried a MS Surface touch cover, but something like that without actual segmented keys might be best. Sort of like a touch cover and Fleksy hybrid.
I would have to be better than typing on a keyboard.
Video was weak. Right when they show the product it cuts out.
Would be good if you were able to touch your finger to the surface and it becomes a trackpad as well.
http://www.keyglove.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/senseboar...