Maybe I’m just a hopeless gadgetgeek, but I want this Roll-Up Keyboard.
From the list of weird keyboards Bruce Sterling linked to recently here.
Maybe I’m just a hopeless gadgetgeek, but I want this Roll-Up Keyboard.
From the list of weird keyboards Bruce Sterling linked to recently here.
And it reminded me of something in Sterling’s novel Distraction when I first saw it.
OK, #1 is even more like the thing in Distraction.
I want the frogpad, just to try it out for a couple of days.
Heh, yeah, a few of those things look like things from SF novels, especially Sterling’s.
I really, really want the laser one, but I’m not paying that much money for it. And it’s exactly like stuff in a couple of my stories. Soon enough, they won’t even need the display, though. I figure that if they can reconstruct text from something as fine-tuned as the differences in keystroke sounds (as they say here) then it should be possible to train a computer up so that it recognizes one’s typical movements in typing certain words. (Just as, in theory, one could train up a PC to finish your words for you after a few strokes, a slightly smarter version of what OpenOffice does for me right now by suggesting words I’ve used in the same document on the basis of a shared root.)
In the very long run, I imagine that keyboards will still be around a long time, but not forever; but I also don’t think we’ll be subvocalizing things anytime soon, or that people will key in texts using keyboardless PCs that interpret their movements forever, either. Instead, I think the PC will become less and less of an inept mimeographer, that’s all, and for many people’s needs, this will more than suffice; eventually, I’m guessing, it’ll be mostly writers and cranks who are still keying things in word by word.