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Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

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Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#153
Fun Fact! the "peace sign" was originally created a superposition of "N" and "D" semaphores as it was a logo for Nuclear Disarmament.

[edit] I originally put U+262E in my comment, but apparently HN strips some unicode characters?

Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#154
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm which gear was particularly French? I was just channeling 80s aerobics workout in the intro, or the style of the songs played in the video.

In the gif on your github, all the "workout" gear colours are blue white and red, the colours of the French flag. If it was a happenstance, maybe you can just say it was on purpose, so...er.. I don't need to tell my therapist I'm reading too much into everything again?

[deleted]

Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#156
Cool idea. I did something similar- a whiteboard with various magnetic icons that were original SVGs. I trained an object detector to recognize the different icons and extract that into a data structure depending on the icon orientation and relative positioning. I wanted to patent that as a brand new way of programming- visual programming with real objects. Never went anywhere with it.

Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#157
If you haven't done so already, see if you can connect with someone on the music side, particularly someone used to working with programmable sound buttons. The combination of your setup plus programmed sound macros could result in something fascinating.

Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#158

Author here! Pleasant surprise to find my project at the top of HN this morning with such positive feedback :) I'm happy to answer any questions or hear suggestions for future tweaks. Planning to make this into a customizable full-body game controller as well.

Can I just say how much I liked the small details here? Like your choice of matching sweatbands, your jazz hands on the last symbol, your choice of pose for backspace, and the commit message, "Updated readme for pedantry". In your honor, I am performing the chef's-kiss gesture. (Which I hope you will include as you add emoji to your input device.)

Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the video was dramatized and that you didn't actually hurt yourself! Rather than type every letter, a more efficient system is to represent sounds with keys. This is how stenography works. Each stoke of the keys is mapped to a series of characters; a letter, a grouping (such as 'sh' or 'ing'), or a complete phrase. Using such a system would allow one motion, for example for 'b', to map to a whole word, such as…

Interesting, I wonder if you could make a BodyChord or FaceChord setup using steno... Can you actually write code using a steno keyboard - as in, full access to all the usual symbols and modifiers - or would it just be for letters and basic punctuation?

Yes! Here is a really great talk on the state of doing so, with a fantastic realtime demo near the end. Mirabai live-codes using her Plover setup and narrates her thought process as she types out each command.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g

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