• keyboard gloves

    As com­ple­tion for a head-mounted dis­play, I envi­sioned key­board gloves, a com­plete replace­ment for a con­ven­tional key­board. Let­ters are typed by touch­ing fin­gers together, dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions result in the sim­u­la­tion of dif­fer­ent key­strokes. Finally, by using Key­board gloves, one could move around freely while oper­at­ing a portable com­puter. Even typ­ing while hands within pock­ets would be pos­si­ble, as each hand can oper­ate independently.

    premise

    possible contact points

    con­nec­tion points on the inside (left) and back­side (right)

    con­nec­tion points:

    • green, blue and pink with orange
    • green with yel­low (blue and pink would be too hard to reach)

    num­ber of combinations

    inside back­side side
    green to yellow 8 2 2
    green to orange 8 6 9
    blue with orange 8 6 9
    pink with orange 8 0 9
    total 32 14 29

    I would sug­gest to use the inside 32 for let­ters, as they are most easy to reach, the side­wise 29 for num­bers and punc­tu­a­tion marks, leav­ing the back­side 14 for func­tion keys. Bear in mind, we are only talk­ing about one hand so far! :)

    real­iza­tion

    For first exper­i­ments, a con­ven­tional key­board con­troller and woolen gloves have been used. Con­tacts have been sewn in. Wires con­nected each con­tact with the con­troller. With all the wires and the con­tacts, wear­ing the gloves was very uncom­fort­able. Not only that the wash­ers used as con­tacts where inflex­i­ble, but also the yarn, used to fix them to the glove, trou­bled con­tact­ing. It would need some­thing much more soft, maybe glued to the fab­ric itself, where also the cables are part of the fabric.

    Problem of using default keyboard controller.

    Prob­lem of using default key­board controller.

    Addi­tion­ally, we ran into another prob­lem as described below and depicted on the left side.

    Using a default key­board con­troller means to map each key 1:1 from the source to its spe­cific con­tact, but in our case, as we use three con­tacts on the thumb, three sources would be needed to allow one “key” to have three dif­fer­ent meanings.

    There are sev­eral solu­tions, the most sim­ple one would be to reduce inputs to only one, result­ing in 16 inside, 11 side­wise and 8 back­side, i.e. still 35 on one hand. This would only allow to per­form alphanu­mer­i­cal input.

    To keep the options of more keys, we tried to change the key­board lay­out and con­nected the sec­ond and third input via shift-key and ctrl-key, but this solu­tion did not work with all pro­grams, as some seemed to inter­fere with the key­board hard­ware some­how directly, bypass­ing the key­board lay­out map­ping of the oper­at­ing sys­tem  (Microsoft Win­dows in our case). An addi­tion prob­lem was, that wear­ing gloves over a longer period of time, did not feel so com­fort­able, espe­cially in sum­mer­time! :)

    con­clu­sion

    A solu­tion must be found, as com­put­ers become small enough to put them in ones pocket and head-mounted dis­plays are avail­able, as well as eye track­ing as replace­ment for a point­ing device. We are only lack­ing some unob­tru­sive, I sug­gest wear­able, input device, as handy and effi­cient as a key­board. Addi­tion­ally some kind of flex­i­ble touch­pad could be attached back­side of the glove as point­ing device.

     
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