A keyboard that rises up from flat touch screens | Hacker News Reader

A keyboard that rises up from flat touch screens

news.cnet.com

90 pointssgrove39 comments

I was just thinking the other day about how the last time I was ever happy composing text on a phone was when I had a Treo.

I didn't do it consciously, but ever since Apple introduced the toushcreen keyboard and it became the standard I've changed my mobile usage pattern from primarily producing (composing text) to consuming (reading and playing games.) The novelty of playing games on my phone wore off quickly, but the loss of productivity has been permanent. For anything that isn't passive, the smartphone is more of a chore to use than it used to be. So I hope this works out.

Swipe typing on Android rules.

It probably rules on iOS, too.

Except that you can't change the default keyboard on iOS.

Interestingly, many of the 'alternative' layouts don't have the same advantages on the phone.[1] For example, any of the layouts that emphasize home row locality, such as the * aks, don't really help when you're typing with two thumbs. The Sholes "slow you down just enough to avoid a physical constraint" method turns out to be useful when you have two digits flopping around with the potential of being in each other's way.

Also, you can change the default keyboard at the application level[2], but this leads to annoying "edit here, copy, paste there" workflow solutions. You can also change it at the system level if you have a phone that can be jailbroken.

A particularly awesome example of alternative keyboard implementations on iOS is Hipjot[3], which affords two-finger swype-style typing. The developer demonstrates 120wpm touch-typing on his phone[4] and advertises 70-90wpm on the Hipjot app store page.

[1] Pretend I acknowledged the iPad.

[2] Fleksy includes an SDK option. http://fleksy.com

[3] http://jormy.com/hipjot/

[4] http://www.macrumors.com/2014/01/11/new-ios-swiping-keyboard...

Oh! Right. That totally slipped my mind, since I haven't used iOS for a few years now.

I really don't get how it's so awesome. I have SwiftKey on my android phone and it's never been faster for me to swipe Type vs just tape type with my phone. The predictions are some much easier and cause much less friction than trying to swipe everywhere. Can someone who really loves swipe keyboard explain?

It's faster for me, but I think an underappreciated benefit is that it allows people to write text with either hand.

SwiftKey is not Swype. I've tried SwiftKey, and whatever algorithm they use to figure out what word you were trying to swipe is terrible. With SwiftKey's swipe typing, certain words are simply impossible to type because there are other more common words along their path. In contrast, with Swype, I can consistently type any word I want to, and do so faster then with tapping each letter individually. Furthermore, since I just have to swipe my finger past each letter, swiping requires less precision than tapping, which requires me to hit the letter exactly.

really? I think typing with modern touchscreen keyboards (with auto complete, word prediction, swyping, and gestures) is much easier and faster than tiny physical keys.

I would even write code on my PDAs that had physical keyboards. Touch screens don't even come close IMO.

I use an HTC Desire Z. It's an Android phone with a hardware keyboard and it works fine. I'm running Cyanogenmod on it. Although I'll admit it's a couple of years out of date now.

And fearing that loss of productivity that has been enough to keep me on Blackberry

CNET actually covered this a few years[1] ago when the tech was first being debuted. I remember reading about it because of the mention of the NSF. In that story, they shared the link to the National Science Foundation's grant page[2] for this project. From there, it appears a team of 3 were awarded $149,354.00.

I think it's great to see that Kickstarters and VC funding aren't the only ways to get some funding to get good, technical ideas of the ground.

[1] - http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20072117-1/tactus-touch-...

[2] - http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1047485

All the cnet author needed was to add a gif or a super short video showing the effect. They did not need to have some long video with voice over with stock footage of people typing for half the video.

I was also struck by the hokiness of the video. It looked like something I'd see on my local news.

I wanted one too: https://31.media.tumblr.com/9f889585e1f6611f216ddced210fb134...

A couple of things that aren't clear: firstly, does the manufacturer have to commit to certain button combinations at manufacture time, or is it runtime-configurable (in other words, can a user install a different keyboard with different button locations and still use it)? Second, is the user still triggering the keypress event just by touching, or is it actual depression of the button that does it?

no idea but...

i could see another type of event being needed - keyTouch and keyPress ???

Touch in this case is rather like hover though.

Lack of hover is one of the trickiest things in designing for touch screens right now. There's no good way to tell the user a bit more about what's going to happen, until they commit to a touch.

I think the answer to the first question lies here:

> Currently, the technology is limited in that it's a fixed single array. You wouldn't be able to use the Tactus keyboard in both portrait and landscape mode, for example. But the goal is to make the third generation of the product dynamic. "The vision that we had was not just to have a keyboard or a button technology, but really to make a fully dynamic surface," says cofounder Micah Yairi, "So you can envision the entire surface being able to raise and lower depending on what the application is that's driving it." Meaning it could display a keyboard when you're typing an e-mail, a number pad when you're dialing a phone number, and perhaps letter tiles when you're playing Words With Friends.

Article published on February 13, 2013 6:24 AM PST.

"Tactus says it wants to be in production by the end of 2013 or beginning of 2014."

I wonder if there is more recent news on this.

According to http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2014/1/14/how-tactus-wi... they're working with manufacturers now and it we'll start seeing them "soon"

http://xkcd.com/678/

If this actually works well, this could definitely fall into "just shut up and take my money" territory for me. I still miss the physical keys my old blackberry had.

This would also be great for gaming, since you could use this to provide a d-pad and tactile buttons.

This is great for people with mental health issues like OCD. My fiancée (who has OCD) was forced to finally upgrade to a touchscreen smartphone, but I still had to get him a keyboard case so that he would have physical keys to press. Trying to type on a virtual keyboard drives him mad.

I have read about its prototype couple of years ago. IMHO, clever and cool, but really useless. Ergonomically it is much better to use separate keyboard and separate screen. Think of it as in UNIX philosophy. Screens are for staring, keys are for typing.

I always mind of expected that someday we'd come up with something more sensible than a miniature Qwerty keyboard for text input on a phone. Something not unlike Swype (or any number of the other alternative keyboards out there) but with an interface which does away with the keyboard metaphor (note that Swype is the only one so far to catch on in any way).

(Also note that voice recognition doesn't count, as to compete with a keyboard your input mechanism has to be discreet)

It's also featured in this year's CES 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJYyy1u1xmQ

Looks better than a touchscreen, but still not even close to a real keyboard. On the other hand, mobile devices are rarely if ever used for more than 140 chars at a time, I guess.

Oddly enough, this technology was foreseen in a novel, Free Radical [1], which some random fellow on the Internet wrote on the basis of the story from the game System Shock. Quite a good novel, actually, and especially so for being something you just randomly trip over on the web; I recommend it.

[1] http://www.shamusyoung.com/shocked/

I'm going to guess that the "pump" is probably piezoelectric? ...but however the pressure is created I suspect it will have a significant effect on battery life while the keyboard is active, which is going to make adoption difficult. I'd always take charge over bumpy keys.

A bit off topic, but I don't frequent CNET much, and was pleasantly surprised to see Sumi Das in the video and as the author of the article.

She was a correspondent on ZDTV/TechTV, which I watched constantly in its day. It may be the first time I've run across something of hers since then.

They've probably user-tested this, but would you want bubbles, or ridges that appear around & outline the buttons that would guide your fingertip?

For a company named tactus it doesn't seem very tactile, if there's no click I don't see the point.

Also, I'm not sure if there'd be as much benefit when pecking with thumbs (SMS style), typing while holding the device, and that's how they seemed to demonstrate it.

If I'm looking to type more than a sentence on a touchscreen, it will generally be on a tablet and with it sitting on a table/lap. And even then, I could get away with something like home keys to stay centred on rather than a raised impression of every key.

I'd like to think that future input in these situations will come from something other than an on-screen keyboard that takes up screen real estate.

Agreed -- if you can't rest your fingers on the keys without accidental input, it doesn't seem like it'd do anything to help enable touch-typing.

This will be really neat!

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