On Sat, Feb 21, 1998 at 10:42:43AM -0700, Don Papp wrote: > An idea I'd like to put into effect is a chording keyboard built into > gloves. [...] I explored this idea a while back; I abandoned it due to lack of free time, but it's an idea with legs. The approach I took was to use force-sensing resistors (Interlink Technologies) embedded in a very light glove's fingertips. These come in a variety of sizes; the ones I have are about 1/4" circles with a 'tail' of about 1" by 1/6". They come somewhat precalibrated (low pressure results in low change in resistance; high pressure has greater-than-proportional results). With a little effort, some care soldering (the material you have to solder in the tail is finicky and touchy), and a good wire organization, you could get a decent, light, & very rugged glove with all 5 fingers having arbitrarily sensitive pads. My method was going to be to take all of the finger inputs and run them up to a heavily modified watch. The watch's buttons would be overridden such that you could hit one button to 'activate typing' and another button to 'stop typing'. An 8k chunk of RAM would save the typing until you got somewhere to download the info. The watch would also serve as a 4-character editing buffer so you could correct mistakes you knew you made. With a lot of deep weirdness, it would be possible to modify this basic idea to involve two hands and a chording system between the two. Problems you run into: 1. Even very light gloves don't bear a lot of wear. We're used to having completely free fingers, especially around the side of each finger, when we try dexterity tasks. 2. Wiring. 10 wires doesn't sound like a lot, but it is, on your hand. 3. Judging inputs. Unless you find a way to put truly boolean switches on the fingers (and remember, the surfaces that the fingers might touch vary wildly), you'll have to come up with some pretty clever ways of making sure that a char is not really an inadvertent touch. I can't work on a project full time, but if you'd like to work on this basic concept, I'd be happy to help out some. Felix
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