I wonder if it really matters with your eyes vs. your hands and fingers. Flicking your gaze around the keyboard seems much easier than moving your fingers around - you'll never have two fingers hitting each other.

And on the other end of the speed spectrum, it seems like it's unlikely that this will ever quite be as quick as operating even a QWERTY keyboard with fully functional hands.

This tool is for people who can't use their hands, of course.

For the average person, we're pretty close to being able to use voice instead of typing.

https://www.extrahop.com/blog/2014/programming-by-voice-stay...

http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html

Throw in eye tracking and precise gestures (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QNiZfSsPc0) and the keyboard isn't necessary.

Instead of coming home from the office with Carpal Tunnel we'll be coming home with hoarse voices. Color me skeptical.

Some people will gladly take a hoarse voice. Ever see someone have to resort to using their nose?

http://www.looknohands.me

There's also this http://voicecode.io/

I'm waiting for the windows version to be released, so I don't have any first hand experience. The videos look promising though.

I use Dragon and python extensions to supplement typing for now.

Thanks for the Project Soli video!

Mind blown!

If we're talking about what's optimized for eyes and the movement of them, you wouldn't even want a keyboard layout, you'd want something more like a dart board or oval shaped dartboard where the spaces are letters and the most common letters are towards the center. QWERTY is fine for someone familiar with it, like an experienced typist whose already mapped those keys mentally, but I expect someone with a lifelong disability would have no true familiarity with QWERTY (since they can't type) and would have to learn any layout from scratch anyway, so you might as well start from scratch.

Someone did start from scratch, almost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITALY

There were keyboard layouts optimized for palmos pen input; fitaly and atomik. The most used letters are clustered in the middle so movements is minimized, theoretically speeding up the eye typing as well. It seems to be a faster entry method then using a switch like Stephen Hawking does or using a single switch morse type system at perhaps 20 wpm, but indeed much slower then having 10 fingers (switches) and perhaps two feet available at the same time.

For visual search I would disregard keyboards entirely and go alphabetical:

A b c d E f g h I j k l m n O p q r s t U v x y z.

I tried to eye out "Batmobile" and had a surprisingly hard time compared to Colemak or QWERTY layouts. (I tested by making fake layouts in Photoshop.)

The issue being that while I can certainly find the letters when they are alphabetical - clusters of commonly used letters are further apart. Having "th" and "ng" visually close to each other aids a lot.

Arranged in a clock face perhaps?

Something like the radial keyboard used in Steam's big picture mode could be really useful here. It would reduce potential error surface by quite a bit.

Good idea, it would make a more memorable position for every letter.

Excellent resource. Thanks for that. Julius