There is an email making the rounds with pictures of a device that looks like a pen that projects a virtual keyboard onto a desk. I haven’t been able to track down the source of these pictures. Does anyone know where these pictures originated?
Since I am the resident geek at work and among my friends, I have been getting “is this legitimate?” emails for a couple of weeks now.
I read an article about this recently, and I believe this is just a product in its conceptual stage. I’ll see if I can find it.
It’s called a virtual keyboard. It’s a Class I laser product which projects a full-sized computer keyboard onto a desk ot other surface. It uses two lasers, typically. One to project the keyboard and one to sense which keys are being struck.
And they are available, albeit pricey.
IIRC Boing Boing wrote about this and said that thumping your fingers on the desk for even a short time got painful.
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My co-worker showed me this (and a few other pictures of the same thing) last month on a Chinese website, apparently taken at some Chinese trade-show. I told her I’d heard of the laser-keyboard thing, but the rest of it (there are 5 ‘pens’ in total) was odd.
I couldn’t get her to commit one way or another as to whether the associated text indicated it was a vaporware mock-up or a working prototype, as the projected screen device looks far brighter and compact than (IMHO) current technology allows.
I think the idea is that this is supposed to be a portable pc in the future, in the current state I think you could play atari 2600 games on it.
I remember reading about the keyboard at couple years ago, it looked great but did not work so well, not sure if it has improved since then.
They are very much a real product; you can get bluetooth and IrDA versions of these keyboards and they will work with a reasonable range of phones and PDAs. Everything independent I have read suggests that they are a truly neat concept, but a pain in the ass to use.
One of these was a plot point in a recent episode of CSI: Miami. I was going to get around to seeing if one ever existed (you can’t trust those muckafergussons). Now I know.
That’s exactly how I found out about it. I thought, “Now, that is really cool. I wonder if they actually exist?”
If you’re ever wondering about a funky or weird piece of technology, chances are pretty good ThinkGeek will have it.
The virtual keyboard thing has been around and available for well over a year anyway, but from what I understand they are neither comfortable nor completely accurate to use. That, and the fact that they need a perfectly flat, non-reflective, preferably dark surface to use makes them pretty niche market.
What I would really like to see is this keyboard become a reality. The original prototype of this that floated around for the longest time showed colour backlit LCD (or possibly OLED) keycaps, but it would appear this latest incarnation is shooting for a more practical, consumer-aimed system.
There was an article on Snopes about it, too.
That CSI:Miami episode was awful. I’m sure these pen computers are well within the financial reach of a blogging receptionist. :rolleyes:
It’s entirely plausible that the company she worked for bought it for her; it’s not even unreasonable that she might have done so herself. It’s not an entire computer, it’s just a keyboard interface. At $150 or so, it’s pretty pricey, but certainly not out of reach of someone in her probably salary range.
I can imagine buying a $150 keyboard. It’s the $30,000 computer mentioned on Snopes that seems a bit out of reach. That biotech episode still had a lot of holes in it.
Every episode of CSI does–don’t even get me started on that electrocuted construction worker scenario! But, in this case, they did explicity refer to the “virtual keyboard”, so at least they got one thing witin the realm of plausibility.
I’ve used one of these keyboards at a technology show (it was being shown as an add-on to a Palm handheld). They’re atrocious to use, but still kinda cool. On all but the absolutely ideal surface, you end up “pressing” each letter at least twice to get it to register, and as others have noted, the jarring nature of doing so is less than comfortable. Accuracy is rubbish as well, since you get no tactile feedback regarding which key you’re pressing.
All in all: brilliant conceptual idea, let down totally by the grindingly tragic reality.