Re:The limitations of terminals as an interface
by blahedo on Thursday December 03, 2009 @07:07AM
(#974195)
Science fiction gives us all sorts of ideas for futuristic interfaces, and I think (and hope) many of them come to fruition. But cursor position dictated by eye movement will be tricky or impossible---we can more or less do this now with the right equipment, but your eyes saccade all over the place, subconsciously, even when you think you're looking at just one thing. You've noted the biggest problem with voice input: it'd suck anywhere other than a private office! (Not to mention the homophone errors. True voice recognition is AI-complete.) Finally, look up the fate of the IBM PC Jr keyboard to find out why a fade-in touchpad keyboard will be less than ideal for fast, reliable text entry....
Re:The limitations of terminals as an interface
by redcap on Thursday December 03, 2009 @10:01AM
(#974419)
I think I've seen the a picture of an PDA attachment that uses a laser to project a keyboard on a flat surface. Of course no tactile clickyness, but it's got to be better than 2 finger typing that happens with most smartphone inputs these days.
For programmers, are mouse and keyboard still going to be king? I can imagine that maybe the mouse could be replaced or supplemented by a camera that matches where you're looking at to a cursor position. This should be faster than mousing around.
For text input the options are a keyboard or voice input/brain input. I don't think the majority will move from QWERTY anytime soon, and voice input may not take off for the simple reason that you're making noise. Brain input might be interesting.
As for any fancy ways of generating programs (plugging components together), you will likely still need to go to a textual level to capture all the detail, so no real application for anything touch sensative there.
As for what form a keyboard might be, your touchpad could generate a virtual keyboard when you need it (and have smart materials to give tactile feedback) and fade back to a touch system when you don't need text input.
I imagine you'll still need an ergonomic setup and regular breaks to avoid occupational overuse syndrome.