3 ms·

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

• 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.