Douglas Engelbart used a straightforward binary encoding scheme for the chord keyset:

Engelbart Explains Binary Text Input. Douglas Engelbart explains to co-inventor, Valerie Landau, and some blogger how binary can be used for text input.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB_dLeEasL8

Engelbart: Think about if you took each finger, and wrote a one on this one, a two on this one, a four on this one, and a sixteen on this one. And every combination would lead clear up to sixty three.

And so writing here like this the alphabet: A... B... C... D. E. F. G, H, I, JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43454343

The commercially available "TapXR" input device also functions as a mouse and gestural pointing device! It's a wearable tap glove that functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I haven't tried it yet though, but it looks really cool.

https://www.tapwithus.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdm8FcsKeoM

A WRISTBAND THAT REPLACES
Your Keyboard, Mouse & Handheld Controller
TapXR was designed to help humans adapt to the next generation of personal computing.

A Unified Way To Interact With Your PC, Smartphone, Tablet, SmartTV, Projector, VR, AR & XR

80+ Words Per Minute

Input up to 10 characters a second with just one hand or go even faster with two.

150+ Customizable Commands

Remap any finger combination into your favorite shortcuts, triggers, key-binds and commands

2500+ Tap Layouts

Enjoy thousands of user-created Language, Utility, Coding, Production & Gaming TapMaps - or make your own!

8 Hours of Battery Life

Get a full day of input on a single charge. Only 1 hour to recharge from zero to full!

----

My previous post about an earlier version from about 7 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17122717

DonHopkins on May 21, 2018 | prev | next [–]

I just ran across a new device called "Tap", a wearable tap glove that functions as both a bluetooth keyboard and mouse!

https://www.tapwithus.com/

I've had any "hands on" experience with the Tap, but it looks very cool, like a modern version of Douglas Engelbart's and Valerie Landau's HandWriter glove!

I asked Valerie Landau about it (wondering if it was her company), but she hadn't heard of it before.

They have an iOS, Android and Unity3D SDK that appeared on github recently, so you can look at the code to see how it works:

https://github.com/TapWithUs

Does this look legit? Has anybody tried it?

If it works as advertised, I'd love to develop TapPieMenus that you can use in VR, mobile, desktop computers, and everywhere else!

I'm excited about the possibility of creating easy to use, fast and reliable pie menus for Tap that users can fully customize, and use with one hand in the same way that Douglass Engelbart described you could do with two hands using a mouse and a chorded keyboard:

>"Well, when you're doing things with the mouse, you can be in parallel, doing things that take character input. And then the system we had, it actually gave you commands with characters, too. Like you had a D and a W, and it says, "you want to delete a word", and pick on which word, and click, it goes. M W would be move a word. Click on this one, click on that one, that one could move over there. Replace character, replace word, transpose words. All those things you could do with your left hand giving commands, and right hand doing it."

It would be cool to have some tactile feedback, so the tutorial could train you to type out letters by vibrating your fingers with a piezo buzzer or something, and maybe it could even secretly spell out silent invisible messages to you while you were wearing it! And you could feel a different silent finger "ring tone" depending on who was calling you, then tap to answer to discard the call, or stroke with a TapPieMenu to send a canned reply.

enobrev on May 22, 2018 | parent | next [–]

LinusTechTips posted a decent review of the Tap a few weeks ago:

https://youtu.be/8za_4g5zCOM