Ah the joys of prior art ...

At 8:07 AM -0700 8/24/03, David Faught wrote:
>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.

The virtual projection mapped keyboard was also done many years ago 
by several researchers. Ivan's HMD did it really nicely (and you 
could "see" what the keys were right through your fingers). I recall 
several others, most notably a number of Bell Labs prototypes that 
worked pretty nicely.

>
>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 ...

The projection keyboard without a little reasonable tactile feedback 
is tough to efficiently touch type on. In the schemes I previously 
mentioned, you could input characters at less than touch-typing rates 
using the chord keyboard or good character recognition. So the main 
reason for the conventional keyboard is to do very high-speed typing.

Cheers,

Alan

>
>
>
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