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Re: Eye-glass display (& input device idea)

On Mon, 29 Jun 1998 12:28:54 +0000,  wrote:

>Bill Richman wrote:
>> 
>> Why not some type of device that straps to the bottom of the wrists of
>> both hands with some sort of flexible shafts or stalks attached to
>> rings around each finger and the thumb?  You could track finger
>> movements at least well enough to detect the relatively large
>> movements involved in touch-typing, I would think. 
>
>You could do this using mercury(yes, I know its poisonous) or other low
>resistance fluid in surgical tubing (as the length varies, the diameter
>changes and hence the resistance), or something similar to the Mattel
>powerglove that uses a polymer material that varies resistance as its
>bent.  You might also be able to use the Mattel powerglove, and get an
>rs-232 adapater and write drivers for it directly.  BTW, the powerglove
>is about $99.  There's been discussion of this on the newsgroup. See the
>archive (http://wearables.ml.org/) for links.

Actually, I was thinking of switches.  I have a couple of Power Gloves
that are interfaced to the PC, but their tracking is pretty sloppy,
there is no side-to-side finger movement tracking, and the little
finger has no bend sensor at all.  

>
>Anything with switches is going to be extraodinarilly complicated. 
>Think about how many keys you need from a keyboard (26 letters, 10
>numbers, 20 more character and special keys (return, shift, etc.)). 
>You'd need at least 50 tiny switches and all the wires 2/switch.
>
You wouldn't need one switch per character.  I would think at most, 15
switches per hand; probably a lot fewer, since that's based on
separate switches for up, down, and either left or right, for each
finger.  Most of the fingers only move up and down the keyboard while
typing; only the index and pinky move side to side, and the thumbs
don't do much of anything except press one switch.  Right there you
can narrow it down to... what?  10 switches per hand (not counting the
"key-pressed" switch or sensor on the fingertip) plus one for the
thumbs?  And this is assuming single-throw switches.  If you used
double-throw, you could reduce it to... 6 (?) per hand?  You don't
need a one-switch to one-character correspondence; you just need to
track finger movement.  (Hmm - wonder if you could do a roll-up
keyboard using a setup similar to a small digitizer tablet, with the
"guts" of a cordless digitizer pen on each fingertip?)

>> You would have the advantage that most people already
>> know how to type, and if it were done right, you could still pick
>> things up, drive, etc, with the device on.  I guess in most situations
>> where I want to use a portable/wearable computer, I don't need my
>> hands for much else, so would be willing to give up some freedom of
>> hand movement in trade for speed of input.
>
>Why not have both? if you had a reliable two handed input you could
>write two drivers, one for two hands and one for one hand.  Not sure how
>you would code one hand, but you might do it as a 1/2 qwerty keyboard
>where there's a meta key to switch which half of the qwerty board you
>are typing on.  You could just create a meta key that switches left and
>right halves of the qwerty keyboard and that way the same driver could
>be both a two handed glove and a one handed 1/2 qwerty.
>
I'll buy that for a dollar.
                            -Bill Richman
                             
                             http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r
                             (Home of the COSMAC Elf Simulator!)

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