A USB Interface to the "Mother of All Demos" Keyset

What I haven't found out is how well a multilingual writer could use these. Do the chords rely on properties of particular language, like English. Does the chord order follow from how often you write letter a instead of x. Would another language be adaptable to same chords, or do you need to make an optimized version?

DonHopkins on May 21, 2018 | root | parent | next [–]

I'll write a blog post about it soon, but I was hoping to benefit from other people's comments and links from discussing it here first. (You could accuse me of "crowd sourcing" my blog post, but I'd like to think of it as applying collective intelligence! ;) ) "The key thing about all the world's big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don't get collectively smarter, we're doomed." -Douglass Engelbart, Intelligence in the Internet Age, New York Times, 9/19/05

https://collectiveiq.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/great-doug-eng...

Or as the great philosopher Linda Richman said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw&feature=youtu.be...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17121632

DonHopkins on May 21, 2018 | prev | next [–]

Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ig8ecXlrA

Q: Some people will have to change their normal method of thinking?

A: I think today, Aday really summed it up, that one of the things about collective intelligence means that we really have to start looking at ways that we can collectively share knowledge. And one of the problems with that is there are no good tools for sharing massive quantities of knowledge. So it's very hard to stay on top of things. So Doug's methodology creates maps and new ways of displaying data that we have not explored. So that we can really see large amounts of data, large amounts of knowledge, put them into structured arguments, so what he means by structure -- and maps, so that people can literally see what exists now and create very rapidly stragies -- both long term strategic planning, as well as tactical planning -- to address the issues that are confronting us.

Q: Does this assume that if people have the same information they'll all come to the same conclusions?

A: No, not at all. What it means that you will be able to look at data and make intelligent conclusions based on the best data we have currently. Because right now there is a lot of good data that is currently not available to the people who are making the decisions. He was saying that this was a dynamic knowledge repository and it was about allowing people to have an intelligence quotient. In other words, he saud that the infrastructure that you have to support a society determines the capability of that society. Just because we have all these capable tools doesn't necessarily mean that we'll behave intelligently, but it does allow us the chance to behave intelligently. So by improving our infrastructure, we're improving our intelligence QUOTIENT, not our actual intelligence. Just like the same people who are intelligent sometimes make bad choices, even though they're capable of making a better choice.

Q: Now you say that Doug was interested in solving the most urgent problems of humanity. What type of problems was he referring to?

A: He was definitely referring to things like Global Warming, issues around water, food, hunger, war, corruption was very high on Doug's list. He also followed very closely the work of the Millinenium Project, and so often times he would cite whatever they had cited. He would often cite those same issues.

Q: Do you think his vision was going to become a reality at some point?

A: I think yes, if I didn't I don't think I would have spend the last 30 years following it.

Q: What did you find most impressive about him as a person?

A: His humility. He was such a humble man, and his steadfastness of keeping his vision. Often times leaders like Doug, who many people call a prophet... In our society, we tend to think of the leaders as these sort of charismatic, ambitious people, and I think that Doug really broke that mold, in that he was a very humble, really shy person.

Q: Do you have any last minute comments or observations about him to finish up. Or a good anecdote?

A: I think -- I wanted to say one thing that Doug told me many years ago. And this is really for the software developers out there. Once, this was in the 90's. And I said, Doug, Doug, I'm just started to get involved with software development, and we have this really cool tool we're working on. Do you have any advice, about ... for a young software developer. He looked at me and said:

"Yes. Make sure that whatever you do is very modular. Make everything as module as possible. Because you know that some of your ideas are going to endure, and some are not. The problem is you don't know which one will, and which one won't. So you want to be able to separate the pieces so that those pieces can carry on and move forward."

Engelbart Explains Binary Text Input. Douglas Engelbart explains to co-inventor, Valerie Landau, and some blogger how binary can be used for text input.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB_dLeEasL8

Engelbart: Think about if you took each finger, and wrote a one on this one, a two on this one, a four on this one, and a sixteen on this one. And every combination would lead clear up to sixty three.

And so writing here like this the alphabet: A... B... C... D. E. F. G, H, I, JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43454343

The commercially available "TapXR" input device also functions as a mouse and gestural pointing device! It's a wearable tap glove that functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I haven't tried it yet though, but it looks really cool.

https://www.tapwithus.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdm8FcsKeoM

A WRISTBAND THAT REPLACES Your Keyboard, Mouse & Handheld Controller TapXR was designed to help humans adapt to the next generation of personal computing.

A Unified Way To Interact With Your PC, Smartphone, Tablet, SmartTV, Projector, VR, AR & XR

80+ Words Per Minute

Input up to 10 characters a second with just one hand or go even faster with two.

150+ Customizable Commands

Remap any finger combination into your favorite shortcuts, triggers, key-binds and commands

2500+ Tap Layouts

Enjoy thousands of user-created Language, Utility, Coding, Production & Gaming TapMaps - or make your own!

8 Hours of Battery Life

Get a full day of input on a single charge. Only 1 hour to recharge from zero to full!

----

My previous post about an earlier version from about 7 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17122717

DonHopkins on May 21, 2018 | prev | next [–]

I just ran across a new device called "Tap", a wearable tap glove that functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse!

https://www.tapwithus.com/

I've had any "hands on" experience with the Tap, but it looks very cool, like a modern version of Douglas Engelbart's and Valerie Landau's HandWriter glove!

I asked Valerie Landau about it (wondering if it was her company), but she hadn't heard of it before.

They have an iOS, Android and Unity3D SDK that appeared on github recently, so you can look at the code to see how it works:

https://github.com/TapWithUs

Does this look legit? Has anybody tried it?

If it works as advertised, I'd love to develop TapPieMenus that you can use in VR, mobile, desktop computers, and everywhere else!

I'm excited about the possibility of creating easy to use, fast and reliable pie menus for Tap that users can fully customize, and use with one hand in the same way that Douglass Engelbart described you could do with two hands using a mouse and a chorded keyboard:

>"Well, when you're doing things with the mouse, you can be in parallel, doing things that take character input. And then the system we had, it actually gave you commands with characters, too. Like you had a D and a W, and it says, "you want to delete a word", and pick on which word, and click, it goes. M W would be move a word. Click on this one, click on that one, that one could move over there. Replace character, replace word, transpose words. All those things you could do with your left hand giving commands, and right hand doing it."

It would be cool to have some tactile feedback, so the tutorial could train you to type out letters by vibrating your fingers with a piezo buzzer or something, and maybe it could even secretly spell out silent invisible messages to you while you were wearing it! And you could feel a different silent finger "ring tone" depending on who was calling you, then tap to answer to discard the call, or stroke with a TapPieMenu to send a canned reply.

enobrev on May 22, 2018 | parent | next [–]

LinusTechTips posted a decent review of the Tap a few weeks ago:

https://youtu.be/8za_4g5zCOM

Was TREE-META directly linked to META-II?