The company ‘Oblong’ has develop the ‘g-speak’ a way of interaction with gloves in a ‘minority report’ style. So why is this new? The technology uses two gloves that not only read spatial movement from left to right like Softkinetic but also from front to back. This allows you to manipulate or control objects in a much richer way.
Selecting an object can be done for instance by closing the hand palm; grabbing an object, just like in the real world. Now you start to realize how unnatural the whole idea of a mouse is. By moving your hand forward or backwards you can for instance zoom in and out of a picture. This way of interacting gives people the possibility to select and manipulate objects in all three axis. [Continue reading...]
A revolutionary way of creating messages is called Swype. The company founders Cliff Kushler and Randy Marsden with their team have developed a system that recognizes words when you slide over the qwerty keyboard with your fingers. Instead of typing the words, like hardware keyboards this is a touch screen. When you want to write a word you simply connect the dots and the program will recognize the word.
QWERTY history
This reminds us about the QWERTY keyboard history. Originally Christopher Sholes developed another keboard layout for the first type writers. He had problems with the first designs however; typists were so fast that the key got stuck into each other, causing a jam. The solution was simple but with great consequences; reorder the layout in a less logical way to keep typists from typing too fast. Other systems such as the ‘Dvorak keyboard’ can type around 400 of the most common words in English without leaving the middle row while the QWERTY keyboard can only reach up till 100. Another statistic; the middle row of the Dvorak system do 70% of the work while QWERTY only does 32%. [Continue reading...]
