DailyDirt: Who Needs A Mouse And Keyboard Anymore?
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Tech news headlines often imply that a new gadget will completely kill off older devices by making them obsolete. Tablets were supposed to "kill" the PC, but that hasn't happened. On the other side of the spectrum, some folks have suggested that no tool ever completely dies. However, that's an extreme position, too. Innovation involves a succession of minor improvements, and occasionally, there are advances that are so significant that people can't help but try to explain the shifts in exaggerated black-and-white terms. The actual story is usually much more complex. We're getting more and more cool input methods beyond simple keyboards, and here are just a few nifty gadgets that probably won't replace keyboards (or mice) but might make human-to-computer communication a bit easier for people.- The Sprout by HP is a PC with a novel interface that uses a camera, a projector and a touchmat (but it can also use a keyboard and mouse). Similar user interfaces have been proposed before (eg. 10/GUI), and sci-fi movies are always promoting floating gesture UI systems that replace keyboards and mice. [url]
- HaptoMime is a mid-air touch interaction system that uses floating images from a holographic display and provides haptic feedback to mimic a touchscreen interface. The focused ultrasound aimed at your fingertips looks cool -- but also a little bit strange and probably something you'd have to use for a bit to get accustomed to. On the other hand, no more greasy fingerprint-covered touchscreens, yay! [url]
- The SideSwipe system provides a gesture recognition system for mobile phones. It's far from perfected, however. It has an accuracy rate of about 87% for 14 different gestures, but it doesn't require a camera -- it relies on wireless signal reflections off a user's hand. [url]
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Filed Under: 10/gui, gesture recognition, haptic feedback, haptomime, hmi, holographic display, input devices, sideswipe, sprout, touchscreen, ui, user interface
Companies: hp
Reader Comments
The First Word
“full circle
Quite often, technology goes full circle. We started out with the telegraph, switched to the telephone, and then went to email and "texting" -- short messages using truncated sentences and abbreviated language that by bizarre coincidence closely resembled the kind of text messages sent over telegraph a century and a half earlier.Subscribe: RSS
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Bluetooth Retainer
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That said though, there are many kinds of people in the world other than myself, and the Kinect's potential seemed to make it useful for all kind of things... except video games.
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It's quite true that no tool ever completely dies.
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Re: It's quite true that no tool ever completely dies.
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Mouse and Keyboard
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full circle
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HaptoMime - hard on your ears
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Who needs a keyboard?
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Re: Bluetooth Retainer
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Re: It's quite true that no tool ever completely dies.
I bet you have really sharp knives.
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Re: full circle
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Re: briquetting machine, briquetting machine manufacturer
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yeah, but...
(and, no, i did not have a choice, my better half got them, but if i'd have known what a PITA it is to 'type' on those screen keyboards, i would have NEVER gotten a 'smart' phone...)
2. using touch screens on a computer is exhausting to constantly hold your arm up to slide over a greasy screen... not viable for the type of CAD work i do...
3. as another programmer above alluded to, if you depend on your computer interaction to involve a fair amount of text, the keyboard is simply a damn good solution...
again, voice-to-text gets good enough (maybe it is now, don't know) then that might be a fairly good tool to use... but not sure how that would work out in -say- our open-plan office layout where everyone is in one big room with no real dividers/cubicles... we're ALL going to be blah blah blahing to our computers and that won't cause any problems ? man, that is going to be one noisy office...
(not to mention, saying "browse pron" in the middle of the office might not go over too well...)
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Re: yeah, but...
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Re:
I was going to say that dictation and speech-to-text would replace the keyboard, but like Mark said above, it's a little hard to say all the programming keywords.
And when you're dictating a text message on a phone, why not just call the person?
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I vote for both mouse and keyboard
But touch screens cut my typing speed to a dismal crawl. I can't imagine writing a book on one of those. Or a program.
And touch...is the mouse family's dark-secret closeted retarded brother. I'd like to think I'm competent with touch, but it is always selecting the wrong thing or not selecting/ignoring touch, or double-touching when I touched once. Then there's the tools you can't use because they require drags you can't do with touch, and heaven help you if you want to select a point between two letter i's.
We spent 140 years perfecting the keyboard and 30 years perfecting the mouse. Screen keyboards and touch have a loooooooooooooooooooonnnnnng way to go before they're anything like as practical.
While I'm ranting: I have a pad and use it routinely; a high end smartphone and use it too. My conclusion is that they are toys, not productivity devices. As they stand, no one will ever make their living using one. If you want a laugh, just imagine trying to work your way through a spreadsheet with 70 columns and 1.3 million rows; or trying to compare two spreadsheets (switching apps at the rate of 30 times per minute); or writing War and Peace.
They're fine for browsing, sound/video, and short e-messages, but that's about it.
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