David Faught wrote:

>Alan Kay wrote:
>>      The most important feature seemed to be that once you chose one

>> style, it was good if the UI permitted you to stay there, and 
>> limiting "back and forths" was very good. The Engelbart scheme was 
>> very good at this. With "hands apart" you could navigate, issue as 
>> many as 3 commands per second, do limited typing a correction of 
>> typos at about a max of 30 wpm, and generally zoom around. For bulk 
>> typing you would move both hands to the regular keyboard where you 
>> could type at 90 wpm or more.
>
>So then something like the Canesta projection keyboard, 
>http://www.canesta.com/products.htm
>might be effective, along with the Smart-Nav hands free mouse
>http://www.naturalpoint.com/index2.html
>??  I just like looking at this stuff!  This would make the input side
>of things pretty virtual, except only at a fixed position.

Actually, if the projection keyboard were "properly" designed, it
should be possible to dynamically remap its sensitive area into various
keyboards, drawing pads, maps, models, or about any other flat object. 
So there would be no need for a separate pointing device and no need to
move your hands away from it.  Don't know if it has tactile home keys,
though.

On the web, I see several announcements for the projection keyboard a
few years ago and a few companies' web sites hawking it to other
manufacturers, but I don't think it is available to consumers anywhere.
 I wonder why ...



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