Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 1 Jul 1999 01:35:29 -0400 (EDT) | From | Alexander Viro <> | Subject | Re: [Way OT] Re: 20 years without semantic innovation is enough |
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On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Dancer wrote:
> Commercial devices have been produced in the past with sensors (not > unlike an eeg) built into a headband. There've been hands-free mice, > keyboards, and joysticks..You may have seen the advertising for them in > computer magazines around 1981-1984-ish. The keyboard was almost > impossible to learn to use (but that was actually a strategic problem, > not a technological one. I know how to fix that). The mouse and joystick > conversions were quite good. Easy to learn to use (that is, about 2-3 > days before you could get 'em to behave). I liked 'em so much I built > one myself once (a mouse - which I later sold to a disabled Mac user to > offset the disgusting (at the time) cost of off-the-shelf > high-sensitivity epidermal pickups). The spooky thing about these > gadgets is that there's a brief delay between you making a conscious > decision to take an action, and actually KNOWING that you've made the > decision (I mean being aware of it). It's eerie to have the mouse > double-click on an icon just as you become aware that that is what you > want to do. > > For my money, a combined keyboard/mouse/joystick unit, with an IRDA link > in my top pocket, and voice-recognition can go jump in the lake. Who > needs it?
Interesting... Mouse and joystick are very low-bandwidth interfaces (actually that's *the* reason of my dislike towards them - point'n'click may be fun, but for editing give me vi and a decent keyboard). How does this stuff work for the keyboard? I have vi in my fingers - serious type-ahead is norm. If this channel can provide comparable bandwidth and lower latency than fingers+keyboard... I'ld like to play with it. Another problem being the noise, indeed. It's easy to keep it low on the fingers+keyboard combination, but I'm not so sure about the EEG-type stuff...
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