Little keyboards impose to type slowly. Worst I know is that of my old Hewlett Packard 28
scientific calculator. It's a high quality keyboard but you can't
"type" with it, you can just press the keys the one after the other.
The
keyboard of my Texas
Instruments Voyage 200 is much better, anyway it's slow. I think
cell phone keyboards are a little faster because you type using your
thumb. Some teenagers are experts at this.
Why are little keyboards slow? I think regular keyboards are fast
because you don't have to coordinate the way your fingers hit the keys.
You just launch your fingers in the right direction and the keyboard
will do the rest of the work to acknowledge your move. On the contrary
when you press the keys of a little keyboard you have to follow a
procedure. You must avoid the surrounding keys, you must place
your finger on the right key and you must place it a way that will make
the pressing possible and reliable, you must press the key and feel the
way it descends, wait till you record the click and then only release
it. If you try to type faster you will make mistakes and you may even
hurt your fingers.
The worst type of keyboards I ever met are flat keyboards, also
called membrane keyboards.
On those keyboards too you must press your fingers both hard and
carefully and wait for a feedback. The feedback doesn't even come
from the keyboard itself, you have to check the screen. And you
can't find the keys if you don't look at the keyboard. It's terrible.
Some membrane keyboard systems help by emitting a short beep sound.
Anyway I think little keyboards can become fast if they are flat. There
are two conditions for this:
The press of a finger must no more be detected by a noticeable
deformation of the surface of the keyboard. What must be detected is
the fact the tip of a finger is becoming flat on the surface.
The surface must be a high resolution array of detectors. So to
speak, a standard 104 keys keyboard contains 104 detectors. The surface
I imagine should have say 100 x 30 detectors.
A good example of such a surface would be a touchpad, except for the
fact touchpads can only record one finger position at a time. Also I
don't know if the absolute position of a finger on a touchpad is
reliable. Today technology allows to make such a surface many different
ways.
Using such a surface, the system will see a disc where the tip of
finger gets flat. It is then easy to calculate which key the finger was
aimed at. If you hit the F key, you maybe also partially hit the D and
R keys but the systems can compute the primary target was the F key.
A touchscreen system should fit but all touchscreen systems I tried
till now have severe problems. Either they lack precision, they need a
strong finger pressure to react or they react slowly.
I made trials by typing on a little keyboard printed on a sheet of
paper. It allowed to type really fast, much faster than any little
keyboard I ever used. I'm sure I made no typing errors. I asked friends
to make the test and they shared my opinion.
The keyboard does not need to be perfectly flat. Maybe a short
little pike at the center of each key can help to type without seeing
the keyboard. Or the keys can have a rim, or have a slightly
curved surface. Maybe the whole keyboard can move down when it is
pressed or it can have a soft surface. What matters is that only the
fact a fingers touches the surface is recorded and with a high
resolution.
For a while I thought of making a working prototype using a webcam. A
rudimentary AI software would have decoded where the fingers hit the
surface. But it meant a lot of work for a result I was already sure
off. By the way, this too is an idea: lots of cell phones contain a
camera. You simply put the cell phone "vertically" on a table in front
of you, so you can see its screen clearly. You put a sheet of paper on
the table, possibly the size of a real keyboard. The camera allows the
cell phone to know exactly which keys you type. You can use any
"keyboard" size and any keyboard nationality, the cell phone adapts
automaticaly, visually. You can also move your hands and your fingers
in the air
or on the table to emulate a mouse pointer on the cell phone screen or
two whole virtual hand. (A friend sent me this link, about a concept
quite close: http://www.virtual-laser-keyboard.com/france/f-a-q.asp
)
