How does the finger thing work? What's he doing? I saw him tippy-tappy but it didn't seem like he's moving through some invisible keyboard.

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dagmx 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

It’s tracking the EMG signals that trigger your finger tendons. Doing that it knows how your fingers are moving.

It can therefore translate it to a handwritten stroke and then do classical handwriting to text conversion.

	▲	jay_kyburz 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		But I only type with my index fingers! You've got to type with your shoulders if you want to avoid RSI!

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swordsmith 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He's scribbling with his finger.

Typing can also work, but handwriting is simply faster and easier to decode.

sEMG signals correlate with *muscle* activation. When your fingers move, the actuators are the muscles in your forearm, and the tendons relay the force on the joint. Placing the band higher up on the forearm would actually give you better signals, but a wrist placement is much more socially acceptable.

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jwrallie 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It was hard to see, but it looked like handwriting to me.

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phire 5 days ago | parent [-]

For marketing reasons, it needs to be something that people can pick up with absolutely minimal practice.

I doubt it has enough accuracy for a virtual keyboards (since keyboards require precise absolute input and it measures relative), besides, most people aren't experienced with single-hand typing.

A bespoke gesture based shorthand would be optimal, but then users would need to spend months learning this new shorthand.

But (almost) everyone already has experience with handwriting, which is a single hand relative input method. It's the easiest option for people to quickly pick up and enjoy.

Though, it's far from perfect, you can see he is struggling to trick his muscle memory into writing without a pen, and he needs to do it on a solid surface (I'm not sure if that's a technology limitation, or a muscle memory limitation).

	▲	swordsmith 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Virtual keyboard is completely doable, but too slow.