::scr air keyboard

[matt jones]

Heh, I love this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,595882,00.html

"At least two companies are working on "virtual keyboards" that let you
touch type keys that aren't there, and both showed prototypes at this
week's Comdex computer trade show in Las Vegas.

A small Swedish company, Senseboard Technologies AB, attracted most
attention with a system based on pressure-sensitive pads.

To use the Senseboard, you put a band around each palm and type in midair
as though you had a real keyboard. The pads pick up your finger movements
and gesture-recognition software converts them into the letters you are
virtually typing."

I can just picture the scene of an office full of people all air-typing
away (perhaps with VR headsets on instead of monitors, for comic
effect). Well, it makes me smirk, anyway.

Actually, forget typing - if you hooked this up to a synth or a midi
system or something like that, you could use it to do air guitar for
real! How about that, Rock-Man-Rock? Now that's an application of
technology that I like - allowing the user to recreate bits of "Bill and
Ted's Excellent Adventure". :)

It's be a great way for a talented musician to perform live - just
bounding around doing air guitar (and not necessarily with a guitar voice,
either). I always used to daydream about (hem) an exoskeleton that was
linked to a portable sampler or synth and which would play different
sounds depending on how you moved. 

Of course, I have neither the engineering or electronics nouse to be able
to build such a device.

I suppose it's sort of a way to combine dancing with playing (I'm sure
that there are one ort two boy-bands for whom this would be a total boon).
I've always thought that wearable devices that respiond to movement are a
fascinating idea. I wonder if that sort of thing would help people who
couldn't dance, or more relevantly, special needs people with
co-ordination problems? Like cerebral palsy sufferers for example. Who
knows? Let's face it, I doubt anyone will ever try it.

What other applications (*outside* of conventioanl computing tasks) of
wireless networking / wearable devices / motion capture do you like the
idea of. Points awarded for comical and/or socially-worthy ones.

-- 
mjx
cheeky monkey: http://snurfer.org/cgi-bin/sands.pl?full=halloween13.jpg