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Comment by pgroves | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't want this as a keyboard, I'd want one hanging from my right front pocket while looking at my phone with my left hand. It's the touchscreen interfaces that are terrible and need replacing, not the qwerty keyboard. The backlash against touchscreens has started with interior car controls and I'd like to see that spread everywhere else.

(Yes I have RSI problems.)

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Touchscreens: cheap to design around, easy to rearrange into the latest fashion, hateful to use, and here to stay--and I don't even have an RSI!

Don't have a child's fingers and a eagle's eyes? Suck it grandpa! You weren't part of our hyperconsuming target demographic anyway.

Ancient China had foot-binding. Perhaps in the future we'll have finger-binding, where teens wrap bandages around their fingertips so they'll still be able to manipulate small electronics in their later years?

How about a pair of gloves that can sense the muscle movements in your fingers and hands and learn to associate those movements with letters on the keyboard as you type. Then when you're away from the keyboard, the gloves just use the model to infer what your movements intend as you "air type". Surely this is possible with modern machine learning techniques and hardware.

The Senseboard virtual keyboard tried to do that a decade ago: https://sandipsandilya.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/senseboard-v... and the AirType as well a bit more recently https://www.ohgizmo.com/airtype-keyless-keyboard-future/

The problem with gloves only would be the lack of tactile feedback to tell your fingers that the key press has registered.

I used a Datahand for several years and while it was very easy on fingers (the activation pressure was much less than typical keyboards, even Topre's), the tactile feedback from the switches was I think essential for typing efficiently.

I miss that thing...

Years ago I was trying to prototype something like this (the "typing gloves" part) with accelerometers. I wanted them so I could see if I could type while lucid dreaming. Alas, my hardware skills were not up to the task!

This reminds me of the wired hand interface in Children of Men[1]:

[1]: https://youtu.be/sJO0n6kvPRU?t=122 (minute 2:02)

At least one company is working on that general concept: https://www.ctrl-labs.com/

I had a toy called hand band that was a similar concept you could move your fingers to produce different sounds but it was only one sound per finger.

Like this? https://www.tapwithus.com/

A character in Asimov's "I, Robot" (the book) had one of these. He even kept it in his pocket so he could type discreetly with his hand resting on his leg.

Interesting. Was that only in the book? because I don't remember seeing that in the movie.

Yeah, the book is... quite different. It's a series of little stories told to the point-of-view character, a reporter, who has this device and records the stories as notes from an interview.

The stories are basically illustrations of how great the Three Laws of Robotics are, which is not surprising since Asimov invented them himself.

You mean how faillible they were? I recall many stories were about how someone died or had an accident because of overzealous or faulty interpretation of the laws... :)

Huh, maybe. I interpreted it as Asimov showing how perfect the rules were, in that the slightest tweak could lead to disaster.

No, the point was that they were detective stories about robot bugs. People who don't understand why people like "sitting in front of screens all day" should read that book to get a sense of how exactly looking at a core dump could be fun.

Sounds like the Twiddler keyboard. It’s been around since at least 1991.

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