This is huge!
A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
111–120 of 140 posts
Re: A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
#112Microsoft R&D does some cool stuff. Kudos. I love where this is going—a laptop with this style tech and no trackpad at all would be very interesting, very minimal. At some level it seems like the kind of thing Apple would do—they've already removed the separate button from the trackpad, so removing the trackpad completely is almost a logical next step.
Looks like it might need to be a little higher res though, before it becomes productizable.
Re: A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
#113I wonder which IR proximity sensor they used. I'm currently using the OSRAM SFH7773 in my projects — it's the cheapest one I could find, but it is still quite expensive ($1.20 at qty 25 from RS/Allied). They are using 64 of them.
I also wonder how they deal with interference. Each sensor emits IR pulses and measures the light that bounced back. On the SFH7773 at least, there is no way to synchronize the pulses to an external source. Which means you will get light bleeding inbetween sensors.
Sadly, the publication is not (yet) available.
On a side note: I noticed that ETH Zurich seems to be doing a lot of groundbreaking work recently in electronics and robotics related fields.
Re: A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
#114This is a project of Microsoft Research. It's purely academic at this point (done in collaboration with ETH Zürich), and at this stage it has nothing to do with the commercial side of the company, except being funded by them.
Apple flamewars and speculation about when this will hit the market are out of place here. Right now it's a bunch of academics showing off a cool prototype, which they couldn't be doing if this project had been developed with immediate commercialization in mind.
TLDR: Yay science!
Re: A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
#115This looks really interesting. I was considering making something similar when my Myo [0] arrived (and probably still will).
The thing that I thought might make it difficult is the exaggerated movements required. All the demos I've seen seem to make the device appear a little insensitive. This demo (of the keyboard) has the same issue. It's probably that you need the exaggerated signals to be sure of the user's intent - or maybe that's just for the sake of the demo?
Re: A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
#116Great idea, anything that might let us kill the rodent at the office is worth pursuing.
Re: A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
#117What about an capacitative touchscreen with increased distance? That would be much more accurate, allowing the keyboard to be used as a trackpad (but would probably require fancier algorithms to distinct touch input from typing).
Re: A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
#118Very cool, but I have to wonder how this would work covered in grease/dust. Most keyboards are very difficult to clean properly.
Re: A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you make the keys transparent and put the IR sensors below them?
A lot of plastic is already IR transparent but totally opaque in the visible spectrum. You can hack a cheap camera and take out the IR filter to make a neat "xray camera".
There are even so-called "Black-Ops Plastics" specifically designed to be fully IR transparent: http://qwonn.com/black-ops-plastics.html
Re: A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
#120I wonder which IR proximity sensor they used. I'm currently using the OSRAM SFH7773 in my projects — it's the cheapest one I could find, but it is still quite expensive ($1.20 at qty 25 from RS/Allied). They are using 64 of them. I also wonder how they deal with interference. Each sensor emits IR pulses and measures the light that bounced back. On the SFH7773 at least, there is no way to synchronize the pulses to an…
Since it's a prototype, I don't think costs (in the range of 64*$1.2) are any kind of problem.