The regular keyboard has been here since typewriter invention in 1868.
It hasn’t changed much ever since. I don’t acknowledge the fact that with all the technological progress that happened last 1½ century – television, lasers, nuclear reaction, rock ‘n roll, computers, instant noodles, internet, skynet, lolcats – we still can’t type any faster than we did in 1868.

Finally there is God:
If we were designed to use the keyboard as it is, God would give us 40 fingers on each hand.

Chorded keyboards gone wrong

Humanity feels that there is something fishy about the keyboard design.
There are already plenty of attempts to fix that. Some are shy – like Dvorak’s new key layout, some more revolutionary – like Velotype.

I’m certainly on the radical side. However before I put my rebel beret on,
I’d like check the history and learn from others mistakes.

The first chorded keyboard was presented in 1968 – a century after typewriter invention – during The Mother of All Demos (video). It came together with computer mouse, video conferencing, hypertext, word processing, collaborative real-time editor and many more inventions that changed our lives. Unfortunately neither the initial chorded keyboard idea nor it’s future variations thrived and became widely used. They were usually missing one of the ingredients:

• Design
  No one is going to spend days on learning all the chords. It must be clear how to type each letter right from start. Ideally the whole mapping is visible all the time. Finding a letter on such mapping diagram shouldn’t take longer than on the regular keyboard. Deciphering the chord must happen without bothering the brain. Therefore the chord mapping diagram must be: compact, clear and intuitive.

• Humanism
  If you think that every finger is equal, you probably should switch to lectures other than Lenin. Fingers have different lengths! Index fingers are obedient while Pinkies tend to be harder to control. Thumbs are stronger but slower. Hell, even Left and Right hand is different! On top of that the wiring makes some chords tougher than the others – try Middle + Pinky. How fast can you switch that with Index + Ring – back & forth?

• Mapping
  After discovering the magnificent world of hand anatomy and learning finger names it’s time to match the chords with letters. It would be nice if the most frequent letters corresponded with easiest chords. And if there are common pairs (e.g. “th”, “in”) or triples (e.g. “the”, “and”) the chords between them should be easy to switch. The optimization process might start with science, but in the end it’s all about trial & error – playing with prototype and trying out which tweaks work. Trust me – it’s very unlikely that you end up with ABC or QWERTY as the most optimal mapping :)

I’d also recommend the patience of a saint & some magic dust.
Other helpful thing might be focusing on the project instead of writing blog posts ;)

The first glimpse appeared during summer of ’11 in Egypt. After having a couple drinks I was talking to my friend about Kinect technology which was quite new back then. Soon we brainstormed about usage ideas and drifted towards having all kinds of virtual stuff: guitar, percussion, puppy to play with etc. But how would you design a virtual keyboard – one that you can use on any surface or even in the air? (and yes, we considered sign language – but for that moment we considered that too complex to learn)

We concluded: Kinect would need to observe fingers-to-wrists relative positions. But then it would be inconvenient to type on plain surface without seeing the buttons (or pretending to push them in the air). A potential solution could be to recognize chords – combinations of finger strokes which would encode the letters. Their position wouldn’t matter then, but only which fingers are down.

Still that would require finger recognition – which Kinect doesn’t support yet :(
But hey! I could actually build a 10-keyed keyboard myself – just to see how it works. After imagining bizarre models made out of bottle-caps, sticks and wires I thought about using Mindstorm Lego blocks. Then I realized I could as well just emulate that on regular keyboard :)

Right after coming home I dug out the napkin design and started experimenting with various layouts on my laptop. It came to my attention that:

• Fingers: Index, Middle, Ring are the fastest ones & easiest to control
• Thumb is slower, but still easy to control
• Pinky is almost as fast as first three, but not as reliable (error-prone)
• Right hand tends to be more intelligent than Left.

Having these observations I came up with that:

There are 5 keys for each hand – I chose them to correspond with natural finger position when rested. You might also notice that the left hand is placed a little higher than right. This is due to strange keyboard wiring – certain key patterns are not recognized when pressed at the same time, e.g open Notepad and try pressing the keys without releasing:

• v + 3 + 2 – all characters are appear :)
• v + 4 + 3 – the last ’3′ character doesn’t show up :(

That’s how the project works:

• Fingers: Index, Middle, Ring: choose row/column inside a square
• Thumbs select the square (middle is default – doesn’t require any action)
• Pinkies are responsible for alternative sets: upper case & special characters

The character mapping was designed based on letter frequency, common bigrams & trigrams. Most frequent letters are located in the middle square (=doesn’t require slow thumb action). Characters that often go together are located in same rows\columns – to speed up switching between them.

Despite my best efforts I didn’t manage to beat the regular keyboard typing speed.
But I haven’t gave up just yet!
When thinking about that, I recalled that one of the fastest geek-species are… the gamers. And of course I needed to try out WASD + Arrow keys as well:

I bet you can figure out the usage by the picture & highlighted pressed keys :)

At that point it took only one spark to to realize that WASD & Arrows might be as well two analog sticks on a game controller. Especially that currently typing text on any of the game consoles is plain TORTURE!

As much as I liked the above design I realized the first impression might be too freaky for some folks. Also the letters are quite mixed up with special characters which might be confusing at start. I also decided to get back to good ol’ qwerty mapping to further minimize the future shock. After some polishing this is the concept I decided to publish:

I hope you like it.