Looks very cool.
But how does it really work. Your fingers are constantly moving through the light so how does it determine if you really meant to use the key or your hand mearly strayed too long. Triangulation perhaps? I imagine the basic idea is similar to the laser scanners we see in most all grocery stores now. And if you have
two scanners, you can more completely determine the position of the fingers at any instant - including height. There's probably some margin for error, particularly in the first release, but the idea is at least theoretically viable.
Looking at the picture again, it seems a little unlikely there are two lasers. Though there might be one laser and two sensors catching the reflected light. Even with only one laser and scanner, the whole thing seems feasible. From the sensor's point of view, you look for downward movements of the fingers, and identify the lowest point in each movement. Assume that at that point the user is actually hitting the key they want. Those users who are in the habit of hovering their fingers close over other keys will just learn not to do that.
Seriously, it doesn't look like the device requires you to keep your fingers
too far from the keyboard to avoid confusion. Note that the height of the projector is rather small, and the angle formed between the projected light and the tabletop is small as well. As long as you stay out of the projected light when you're not actually typing something, no problem. If you don't - well, it depends how good the software for interpreting results is.
With all the respect to this invention, I don't think this invention is very practical, at least right now. Reasons: 1) The light has to be strong enough; I doubt that's much of an issue - it's a laser. (Or multiple lasers.) They can be quite bright, on just about any surface. Probably there should be a brightness control though, as for a laptop you don't want to use extra power unless you need to.
2) You have to find a flat, keyboard-sized, light-colored area and to put the light source properly, to set up your keyboard. Sometimes, it is just even harder, like in airplane; Broad, flat surfaces are not that uncommon really. Typically we call them tabletops.
Sometimes this is not practical, true, as on an airplane for example. But I suspect you could even use a book if you needed to - a mass-market paperback mich be too small, but most hardcovers would be OK. Positioning the projector correctly (and keeping it there) may be difficult. Perhaps they could sell some sort of clip-plus-extension-arm which you could use to attach the projector to a small surface like a book.
As discussed above, the color of the surface is not really much of an issue. Dark would be fine. The worst sort of surface, visually, would probably be a multicolored surface (like many book covers) but again, I suspect this would work OK if you turn the brightness up enough.
In general, I suspect his device won't appeal that much to those who like to use a laptop
on their laptop. But many of us just like to be able to carry the computer around easily, and when we actually
use it, it's on a table of some sort. For users like us, this keyboard seems pretty cool.
3) Each time you face a different key board, it is not good for typing speed and accuracy; Yeah, that could be an issue to some extent. But many of us don't have such great typing speed anyway, and wouldn't notice the difference. Futhermore I think that again, if you're projecting the keyboard on a table top rather than a paperback or something, then one table top will be pretty much like another - and once you adapt to whatever quirks the keyboard may have on one surface, it will be much the same elsewhere.
[ December 04, 2002: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]