4 ms·

I don't think OP is referring to a touch keyboard, but rather that the keycaps of each key would be one part of a larger multi-touch surface. As your finger lef

I don't think OP is referring to a touch keyboard, but rather that the keycaps of each key would be one part of a larger multi-touch surface. As your finger left one key you could sort of "guess" the direction it was going and have something close to one big multi-touch panel that was composed of smaller surfaces. But I could be wrong as well.

FPGAhacker 8y ago
I had this idea a while back as well. What brought it to mind was wishing I didn't have to take my hands away from the keyboard to mouse around. Anyway, Apple has patents covering this idea. I believe 9,041,652 is the one I'm thinking of.
- mncharity 8y ago
  Yes, patents have been amazingly toxic for HID progress. Commercial HID innovation seems to be bimodal, DIY and bigco, with a patent-induced desert in between. Take multitouch. Years of crippled small companies, selling kits to dodge patents, to small DIY communities (DIY historically being much less of a thing than now). Speech-to-text and Nuance. Hand pose from webcam and colored glove research, becomes of-course-unsuccessful startup, bought by bigco, and thereby unavailable to support further innovation. Leap Motion's DIY Project North Star is an ongoing example - there's software, and you can buy parts, but not devices. So while there's an active small-company ecosystem around say keyboards, that falls off really fast. Small-scale markets of oem support for exploration and innovation... aren't an interesting niche for bigcos. So they produce patents and not products, and even proven too-small-just-a-distraction-for-us markets are abandoned. As education innovation starts overlapping ML and tech, it looks to be picking up similar dysfunction. Ah well.
mncharity 8y ago
Indeed. And with a keyboard like this[1], the gaps between keys are smaller than (my) finger width, so a sliding finger might provide continuous data. Optical position tracking of fingers was actually ok (but not on a bus, and not so much for stylus), and with a look-along-the-keyboard-surface mirror, even optical height and touch was ok. But the touch wasn't great, and occlusion was a "keep it always in mind" problem. So I would have been delighted to find say a low-precision multitouch textile, to hopefully drape over the keys without too-much impairing typing. To decouple a fast low-precision-XY high-precision-Z touch, from simple and adequate camera XY. But crafting a capacitive grid... seemed a yak too far. All this was yak shaving - I actually wanted to be exploring VR IDEs catalyzing improved programming languages. :/ [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/ThinkPad_X1_Carbon_Japanese_Keyboard.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/ThinkPad...

FPGAhacker 8y ago

I had this idea a while back as well. What brought it to mind was wishing I didn't have to take my hands away from the keyboard to mouse around. Anyway, Apple has patents covering this idea. I believe 9,041,652 is the one I'm thinking of.

mncharity 8y ago
Yes, patents have been amazingly toxic for HID progress. Commercial HID innovation seems to be bimodal, DIY and bigco, with a patent-induced desert in between. Take multitouch. Years of crippled small companies, selling kits to dodge patents, to small DIY communities (DIY historically being much less of a thing than now). Speech-to-text and Nuance. Hand pose from webcam and colored glove research, becomes of-course-unsuccessful startup, bought by bigco, and thereby unavailable to support further innovation. Leap Motion's DIY Project North Star is an ongoing example - there's software, and you can buy parts, but not devices. So while there's an active small-company ecosystem around say keyboards, that falls off really fast. Small-scale markets of oem support for exploration and innovation... aren't an interesting niche for bigcos. So they produce patents and not products, and even proven too-small-just-a-distraction-for-us markets are abandoned. As education innovation starts overlapping ML and tech, it looks to be picking up similar dysfunction. Ah well.

mncharity 8y ago

Indeed. And with a keyboard like this[1], the gaps between keys are smaller than (my) finger width, so a sliding finger might provide continuous data. Optical position tracking of fingers was actually ok (but not on a bus, and not so much for stylus), and with a look-along-the-keyboard-surface mirror, even optical height and touch was ok. But the touch wasn't great, and occlusion was a "keep it always in mind" problem. So I would have been delighted to find say a low-precision multitouch textile, to hopefully drape over the keys without too-much impairing typing. To decouple a fast low-precision-XY high-precision-Z touch, from simple and adequate camera XY. But crafting a capacitive grid... seemed a yak too far. All this was yak shaving - I actually wanted to be exploring VR IDEs catalyzing improved programming languages. :/ [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/ThinkPad_X1_Carbon_Japanese_Keyboard.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/ThinkPad...