The Ultimate Keyboard
Around 3 1/2 years ago, I stepped up my keyboard game, and went from a standard laptop keyboard to one which (I thought) might be able to satisfy all of my needs: The rae-dux
Aand don’t get me wrong—after all these years I’ve been using it I still think that this is the keyboard that rightfully is getting described as an keyboard endgame keyboard.
It has combos, home-row mods, easily activatable layers, doesn’t need diodes when soldering, is wireless, hold-tap layers, and has basically solved my RSI issues in one fell swoop.
But it’s also still limited by it being a keyboard with actual keys on it.
So, I’ve wondered: What would an even better keyboard look like?
I think an even better keyboard would take advantage of those:
- our fingers can do way more than only move in one and a half direction (up + down, and sometimes to the side)
- the smaller the travelways of our fingers, the better.
- basically any standard resting position for our hands is bad (it bends our necks, shoulders, elbows, or hands in a non-normal way).
- our typing speed is severely limited by us typing sequentially
So, what does that give us?
- input devices shouldn’t have keys, but probably something else (mini-joysticks, cameras, wrapped finger tips like in gloves?)
- our fingers should never need to switch positions (like for accessing another key or so), they move the minimum amount needed to disambiguate the meaning of the movement
- the input devices should be wearable to some extent, so that it either stays in a normal resting position (which is directly on our legs), or that the user can switch the positions of neck, shoulder, elbows and hands pretty easily.
- chording would make things way easier.
§ Design sketches
Well, before we’re ready for those, we probably want to take a short moment to think about what’s good about a keyboard:
- tactile feedback is amazing
- having clear outputs out of the keyboard is amazing: The keyboard is so nice because its output is clear in intent (compared to a mouse, where you mostly can’t do that in modern user interfaces), and the act of clicking a key is really, really simple and fast.
- the basic unit of interaction should be as frictionless as possible
With that in mind:
§ #1: The better charachorder
The charachorder is a pretty sleek device. It has joystick-like inputs, you can type really fast on it, the feedback is clear, the basic unit of interaction is simple, and it supports chording (hence the name).
But it also has two glaring problems (one stemming from the other).
- It barely uses our motor range better than a normal keyboard (the keys only have four fast directions, you can’t combo them, and placing them on another of the joysticks is considerable work)
- It is considerably worse on combos (though that’s just a software problem, and thus more easily solvable.)
- It needs you to move you fingers from one joystick to the other.
But let’s build on that:
What I’m imagining is a device with 10 full-range joysticks, one per finger, inside a strap-on/glove thing (similar to Typeware). Those 10 joysticks can then take on as many positions as one can handle, and you can slice them more fine-granular as you go.
That would be one way to fulfill all of my requirements.
Writing in here is haphazardous, disjointed and sketchy.
It's probably a good idea to come back later.
§ #2: The glove 1 (only small fingertips on a skeleton similar to typeware)
§ #3: The glove 2 (a real glove, and you can also try and use how you bend your finger or something?)
§ #4: The haptic touchpad
§ #5: The camera
Writing in here is haphazardous, disjointed and sketchy.