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MacRumors Giveaway: Win a Gesture-Based 'Tap' Keyboard That You Wear on Your Hand

I remember this being tested on tv by a guy for a week here. It seemed horrible. You basically have to learn how to „write“ from scratch. Ain’t got nobody time for that
 
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Why does this device actually anger me? I shouldn’t feel anything, yet I do. Perhaps it’s the creators’ attempts to make it ‘a thing’. They seem to think they’re ushering in a new era, but they’re really just muddying the waters of useless tech with yet another piece of plastic and silicon. Is this more accessible for people with disabilities? I don’t particularly see how given the other technological solutions that exist out there. I’m sure there’s a market for this thing, but let’s hope it’s small and short-lived.
 
Can I please have the name of the delusional investor who said “yeah, that sounds like the future, let’s fund it!”? I have a couple of revolutionary ideas from my pre-pubescent days I’d like to revisit... JFC
 
Can the Apple Watch use an external keyboard? This would be pretty great as an input device for that. Drawing each individual letter is time consuming, and dictation regularly fails to understand what I'm saying.
 
subjonas said:
Yeah I doubt I would use this outside of work. By the way, I’d use it with my Mac and Cintiq, not iOS device.

But I would be very open to using something like this for everyday mobile typing with a couple of conditions:
- if they could somehow achieve the same functionality with an unassuming wrist band instead of a glove. Maybe on a distant future Apple Watch. I think I might have seen a typing wrist band actually, but I don’t think it worked well. Not sure how they could get this to work accurately, so this is a big if.
- if after the learning curve, typing on it is as fast as or faster than thumb typing on the onscreen keyboard. This wouldn’t compete with physical qwerty keyboards obviously, since using two hands to type will always be faster than one hand. But you have to set the device down to use to do so. This would instead compete with typing on the onscreen keyboard while holding the device.

Under those conditions, I wouldn’t mind going through the learning curve for the payoff of getting back a full screen unimpeded by an onscreen keyboard. I’m up for the challenge.
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Yeah, I can think of a couple of ways to sense finger location from the wrist but the sensor mat would be complex and hard to keep calibrated.

Devices like projected keyboards are still a thing. I remember when Dvorak keyboards were trying to gain traction but most of us slogged through typing class and I wouldn't want to do it again.
 

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I would love if some kind of virtual keyboard were actually possible at some point, but something tells me that this concept is just not ready for prime time. I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t think I am.
 
C DM said:
Clearly people can't choose to use something if they want to.
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People can choose from a wide range of choices, however, not all choices are equal to a choosy chooser. Some choices may be hard to defend when the choice of the choice is questioned.
 
Crowbot said:
Devices like projected keyboards are still a thing. I remember when Dvorak keyboards were trying to gain traction but most of us slogged through typing class and I wouldn't want to do it again.
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I went ahead and slogged through. All my computers are set to switch between QWERTY and Dvorak. My personal computer has it by default.
 
Um, I got one as a birthday gift... 😎

It‘s actually a nice agility training if you‘re not playing an instrument, and you can learn it in a day or so (and use it for two more 😀). Build quality is also nice, with the case and all. Some VR geeks did wear it as a signature item, when it came out.

However, for actual typing its too slow, even if you are a skilled typer. There are a few tool alphabets/short cut bindings that might make sense for the lazy internet surfer, music listener but other than that... Maybe as a remote for... if you don‘t have a smart watch or voice assistant... It‘s sitting decoratively on my shelf now.

The most annoying thing is the fact that it only works works well on a hard surface as it has to detect that tap’s stop acceleration. So no usable typing on your thigh, mattress or without having an actual firm ground at hand, which were the only use cases I would have found helpful. You might use your tablet as a base to turn the whole idea into madness 🙄

I liked it as a gift though even if it‘s just a way to combine acceleration detection chips with BLE, both inexpensive HW components these days. Sphero does a similar thing with their color reading tap rings.

Maybe with a second one it would make
sense, since one should always try to do more of the stuff that did not work out to finally succeed...
 
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“After a Tap purchase, customers who are unable to reach 30 words per minute after finishing TapAcademy can return the product and get their money back.”

It’s a novel idea, and the guarantee makes it easier to try out. The only concern I have is what if you forget a particular letter or awkward symbol? It would ideally work with onscreen feedback so you don’t need to touch the screen.

Can it also move the “trackpad” that comes up when you 3D Touch the iOS keyboard?
 
I remember being in school and pretending me and my friends could communicate by tapping patterns on the desk. I wish I had thought of capitalizing on something that never really worked.
 
Beyond the "haha this is silly/useless" reaction, there is a more serious side to this.

In a day and age where we need to, and should be, conserving resources, making the currency of the era/region more valuable, and stabilizing economies... this really should have never gotten past an R&D lab, if it even deserved funding in the first place.

I know that's just my opinion, however take a minute to add up in your head the wasted resources:
  • Valuable Engineering effort
  • Money spent in R&D
  • Money spent in prototyping and tooling
  • Administrative overhead
  • Marketing dollars
  • Paying for articles to be written
  • Us spending time to comment on the value
Might be better for the environment to just keep using plastic straws than dump resources into something like this.

Let's cure cancer, reverse global warming, be rich, etc.
 
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