I've already thought of that joke

May 27, 2010 4:54 AM

Type one-handed on a keyboard virtually "folded up" to be half the size? Pff. With zero training? Double pff. Except it totally works.
posted by DU (88 comments total)

The guys sells a half-keyboard, but I posted this as a non-Pepsi Blue link anyway because it is potentially helpful (and kind of mindblowing) even if you have a full keyboard. Temporary injuries, better mouse interaction, etc.
posted by DU at 4:55 AM on May 27, 2010

That headline could be on all FPPs...
posted by Harald74 at 4:58 AM on May 27, 2010 [4 favorites]

That is actually easier than I was expecting!

Still incredibly fucking difficult, though.
posted by Dim Siawns at 4:58 AM on May 27, 2010 [20 favorites]

The demo convinced me, but the price was extremely steep at USD 595!
posted by Harald74 at 5:00 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

That...is really brilliant. When I realized it was just flipped, I could do it pretty decently without looking at either my keyboard or theirs. And I'm kind of left-right impaired sometimes. Color me impressed.
posted by phunniemee at 5:04 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

I bet a half-keyboard is a pretty simple re-make. Not as simple as just chopping one in half, but not a lot more complicated.
posted by DU at 5:05 AM on May 27, 2010

They've got to be kidding at that price point. $595?!?
posted by pjdoland at 5:05 AM on May 27, 2010 [2 favorites]

This could just as well be turned into a software solution to use with your existing keyboard.
posted by cronholio at 5:07 AM on May 27, 2010 [6 favorites]

I couldn't type well with the demo. I just get a bunch of garbage after a few letters, even while I try to learn the trick.

So the $595 seems, accordingly, really steep for something that seems like an interesting idea that I would have otherwise been interested in trying out at leisure.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:09 AM on May 27, 2010

I tried holding down the space bar, but it just registered as me typing a lot of spaces.
posted by Lucinda at 5:13 AM on May 27, 2010

And for double that I'll give you a quarter-keyboard!
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:13 AM on May 27, 2010 [5 favorites]

I'm surprised it's not wireless Bluetooth at that price.

(...and take a look at how thoroughly they disguise the fact that it's wired on their website - - none of the photos show a wire - - it took me quite some time to find that info buried in a passing reference in the pdf user manual.)
posted by fairmettle at 5:15 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'll keep this in mind in case I ever lose a hand.

Do they make a one-handed guitar, too?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:17 AM on May 27, 2010

Not bad, I managed to type this first off:
"Hellw theue rthil is aone handed keyboard demo"
Neat trick. I might be tempted to get one... I thought. Then I realised they were $595? #
FUCKING HELL NO.
posted by handee at 5:19 AM on May 27, 2010 [2 favorites]

I think something must be wrong with my brain because I couldn't get it to work for me. I kept having to look down and see which side of the keyboard the letters were on. Also, the letter 'n' kept tripping me up for some reason. Cool concept though.
posted by bluefly at 5:20 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

That the immediate reaction of many to a neat brain effect is to see if they can buy it (rather than just enjoy or at most remake it) really says more about us than about the guy charging $600.
posted by DU at 5:24 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

I also had trouble with the letter n. I feel like this already exists and is in use in some industries... possibly saw a documentary about either astronauts, divers, or crane operators who used one handed keyboards like this. Alternatively, I read about it a Kim Stanley Robinson novel.

Regardless, I watched so much porn as a teenager that I can type pretty well with one hand, and I'm equally proficient with my left and my right. TMI?
posted by doublehappy at 5:24 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

Huh, pretty sure these guys used to sell half-keyboards (the kind with, uh, only half of a keyboard) for like $150 or so. Guess they simplified their lineup. I've always been pretty impressed with their research and stuff.

If you're looking for a software solution, though, there definitely exist; this autohotkey script has your back, if you're using Windows anyway.
posted by closetpacifist at 5:31 AM on May 27, 2010 [3 favorites]

That the immediate reaction of many to a neat brain effect is to see if they can buy it (rather than just enjoy or at most remake it) really says more about us than about the guy charging $600.

What the heck do you mean by this? You're upset that people are talking about the price for the product sell page you posted?
posted by cavalier at 5:32 AM on May 27, 2010 [3 favorites]

My fingers don't get this at all. I suspect there are many fast-enough touch-typers like me who don't use the classic asdf jkl; home key method. We'd have to relearn how to type to use these.
posted by gubo at 5:37 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

That the immediate reaction of many to a neat brain effect is to see if they can buy it (rather than just enjoy or at most remake it) really says more about us than about the guy charging $600.

What the heck do you mean by this? You're upset that people are talking about the price for the product sell page you posted?

Specialization is bad. I'm typing this on my homemade computer over my hamdcranked Internet. I hope you didn't just immediately buy either of those things.
posted by grobstein at 5:40 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

Maybe the other half is cheaper.
posted by Drasher at 5:41 AM on May 27, 2010 [8 favorites]

It took me about a minute and a half to type "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country."
posted by uncleozzy at 5:49 AM on May 27, 2010

This is really, really hard for me. I touch-type at around 100 words per minute normally, so it's not just that I'm a bad typist. But I can't get this to work at all.
posted by magnificent frigatebird at 5:58 AM on May 27, 2010 [3 favorites]

The FrogPad is less expensive, though possibly less available.
posted by b1tr0t at 5:58 AM on May 27, 2010

Xkcd did this a while ago as well, using caps lock. If you're running linux, you can give it a shot.
posted by Lemurrhea at 6:01 AM on May 27, 2010 [6 favorites]

I have known inventor Edgar Matias off and on for like 15 years – from back when he was Bill Buxton’s student at UofT. I wrote a piece for the Voice back dans la journée about the original Half-QWERTY software, and a couple of years ago Edgar lent me one of his several models of hardware keyboard (manufactured, it was said, with the last production lot of collapsing-spring switches). I found quite a few little defects and ultimately couldn’t type on the thing due to the phantom-letter problem.

Nonetheless, Edgar’s mirror-image typing method has been usability-tested and actually does work. Of course there is a retraining period; please don’t act like you expected otherwise. But if you have the use of only one hand, it’s a great method.
posted by joeclark at 6:04 AM on May 27, 2010 [2 favorites]

Hurf durf I bet they know what to do with the other hand.
posted by mccarty.tim at 6:05 AM on May 27, 2010

Huh, pretty sure these guys used to sell half-keyboards (the kind with, uh, only half of a keyboard) for like $150 or so.

$99, in fact, back when they were meant to attach to PDAs. These days, I think they're expecting them to be paid for by corporate disability insurance rather than actual humans, and it turns out there's virtually nothing competing in that space, so $600 must seem to make sense to them.

I've got one of these; I was lucky to find a cheap refurb to deal with my carpal tunnel syndrome, but I've been unable to get it working with my Mac or Linux boxes so far; they ship it with a PS/2 to USB adapter widget that doesn't seem to quite work properly. I did spend some time corresponding with them, though, to try and convince them (because I think it's actually great technology) that gamers are their target market, and they should be making a more ambitious model that's both USB and has a few more function keys available. That receptionist with the classic iMac on the website isn't your sweet spot, I said - replace your receptionist with a scruffy 22 year old, replace the iMac with a 24" screen running Crysis or something, and aim for those guys.

There's not a lot of stuff in the one-handed or ergo keyboard space that isn't insanely expensive these days. Frogpad makes (or at least, made) a similar product, and had lefty and bluetooth options as well, but they're very much in desperation mode right now trying to save the company, and aren't actually shipping anything. Other options are either completely unwieldy, insanely expensive or both.

I'd _love_ a bluetooth version of this. Love, love love. I've tried to convince the Matias people that if they made either a BT version or a gamer's version, and priced it somewhere between $80 to $100, they wouldn't be able to make them fast enough.

We'll see. It's really shocking how fast you can learn to type on these things with a minimum of hassle.
posted by mhoye at 6:05 AM on May 27, 2010 [2 favorites]

That was a lot easier than I expected, but it reminded me of the times I've given Dvorak a try - perfectly possible, but with hands and brain both screaming THIS IS WRONG, pretty disturbing.
posted by a little headband I put around my throat at 6:07 AM on May 27, 2010

Half a Dvorak.
posted by nthdegx at 6:10 AM on May 27, 2010 [3 favorites]

Real hackers type ASCII codes in raw binary while biking.
posted by djb at 6:11 AM on May 27, 2010 [3 favorites]

Unsurprisingly, the demo doesn't work with a Dvorak layout keyboard. A few letters are missing and there's doubled punctuation. That might not be an issue with the hardware keyboard, and I'd actually like to try it that way.
posted by 6550 at 6:20 AM on May 27, 2010

Screw that. I'll wait for an EEG interface that types out exactly what I'm thinking.
posted by bwg at 6:30 AM on May 27, 2010 [2 favorites]

Clearly there is a learning curve, but I liked it. I think I could get reasonably fast on it with a little practice. The price is, if not outrageous, definitely out of my reach (nor, for that matter, do I have a compelling reason to need to type one-handed). But as a concept, I really like it.
posted by Forktine at 6:33 AM on May 27, 2010

Hmm, must go and dig out my lefty-bluetoothy Frogpad and give it another go.

(Bought it a few years ago. Gave up in the end; what killed it for me as a tool wasn't the device itself, but the PalmOS driver software, which was ghastly beyond belief. Hopefully it'll work with an iPad; if not, there's always the Think Outside Stowaway ...)
posted by cstross at 6:36 AM on May 27, 2010

Lemurrhea: "Xkcd did this a while ago as well, using caps lock. If you're running linux, you can give it a shot."

Thanks (this comment pecked out slowly with said mode installed). It seems that my "type with my left hand while my right is busy" pecking habits are fighting with this way of typing - but I will try it out once in a while, it is a great option.
posted by idiopath at 6:42 AM on May 27, 2010

Temporary injuries, better mouse interaction, etc.

Driving while typing.
posted by Brian B. at 6:43 AM on May 27, 2010

bwg, I like the way you think :) (this is my dream, in fact)
posted by symbioid at 6:47 AM on May 27, 2010

I touch type one handed on a regular keyboard (movement issues with my left hand prevented me learning to type the standard way) so I'm not sure what the benefit of half a keyboard is besides a space saver.

And I tried the demo, but I tried it as I regularly type (my home row is F-J with my thumb on the space bar) and it didn't work. Or it did and it just came across as exactly the same as how I type anyway. I'd have to relearn to type with a different home row to make this work, which, no thanks.

But yes, typing one handed is rather, er, useful. Besides for the obvious joke reasons.
posted by aclevername at 6:50 AM on May 27, 2010

Hurt my brain. No thanks.

The best keyboard EVAR came with the Quadex computer typesetting systems sold during the 80s. It just felt good.
posted by kinnakeet at 6:51 AM on May 27, 2010

What, no love for the Twiddler?
posted by adipocere at 7:01 AM on May 27, 2010

This reflected layout idea has been around for at least 10 years, with a variety of manufacturers. It's not a bad idea, but it doesn't solve enough problems to have caught on in a big way.

An interesting alternative that works is the Twiddler, a one handed keyboard that you can hold in your grip rather than setting on a board. Nice for when you're on the go. A few friends of mine doing wearable computing research swore by them, could type 30-40 wpm pretty easily. I tried a bit and the chording definitely had a learning curve, also it was physically uncomfortable for my RSI-prone hands.

iPhone has proven that predictive typing can work great even with a limited input surface. I'm hoping people will come up with good alternate keyboards for other users on those ideas some day.
posted by Nelson at 7:07 AM on May 27, 2010

I'm normally all over the keyboard with both hands, since I never paid attention in typing classes and my typing just sort of grew. As a result, I've never had anything even slightly resembling carpal tunnel syndrome and this half-keyboard is completely useless to me.

The fact that I could buy a whole laptop computer for the cost of the thing is a little offputting, too.
posted by flabdablet at 7:12 AM on May 27, 2010

For 595 dollars I could afford just to cut off my hands and wire my brain directly into the net!!!!! FLOating around cyberspace, a being of pure energy + information to check otu the latest sports scores/stock quotes, Mhh! A spinning polygon gives me info. Look a t what Glenn Beck has been up to, lets ruin fox news poll about dis, wow!! Use Your Data Brain To F*** Bullshit Society And Read More Chompksy Ha ha Yeah, I'm A Cyber Cowboy
posted by Damn That Television at 7:15 AM on May 27, 2010 [5 favorites]

We've had chording keyboards for quite some time, but what we need is a chording keyboard for the backs of mobile phones, thus letting you touch type on your phone, and eliminating the sliding keyboards and worthless touchscreen keyboards.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:24 AM on May 27, 2010

What about us uber nerds who use Dvorak keyboards. And can you create your own custom layouts? I do a lot of programming and type in Esperanto so I wrote my own keyboard format Programmisto Dvorak.

Would be great if you could have the half be left or right handed, so the ambidextrous could program on two screens
posted by digdan at 7:30 AM on May 27, 2010

This would seem to work better with those of us who learned proper typing techniques (home keys) as it's simply a variation on the backwards-writing trick. Touch-typists haven't pre-conditioned their hands to stay on one side of the keyboard.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:33 AM on May 27, 2010

Here is a linux module to get a half keyboard when you hold down the space bar:

http://eklhad.net/linux/app/halfqwerty.c
posted by bdc34 at 7:42 AM on May 27, 2010 [3 favorites]

They really need to license xkcd's idea of letting you type without a modifier key and making the computer figure out which letter you meant from context.

On the other hand, the use of the spacebar here is a million times better than xkcd's caps-lock method.
posted by straight at 7:46 AM on May 27, 2010

Yeah, that actually worked pretty well. It was annoying but not particularly difficult. I've always thought we needed one-handed chorded keyboards, like Douglas Englebart proposed when he invented the mouse and hypertext. The idea was you could mouse and type at the same time. The current method of typing, then switching to the mouse kind of sucks. It would speed things up a lot of we could issue commands to any point on the screen, not just whatever we've selected.

That the immediate reaction of many to a neat brain effect is to see if they can buy it (rather than just enjoy or at most remake it) really says more about us than about the guy charging $600.

What? No, trying to charge $600 for a keyboard actually does say a lot about the guy. I mean. $600!? Is he making these by hand or something?
posted by delmoi at 7:49 AM on May 27, 2010

Speaking of alternative entry systems (sorry to distract from hardware based systems) but does anyone remember/use/heard of dasher

I'm now trying to imagine a more refined interface for it. Curious about anyone else's experiences.

Think i'll try this mirrored layout tonight on my Ubuntu setup :)
posted by symbioid at 8:04 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

That the immediate reaction of many to a neat brain effect

Motor symmetry stuff is pretty damned neat, but you didn't bother to actually talk about it in your post and Matias' site doesn't provide anything either. I'd love to see a post that actually tackled the subject, but this isn't it, and it's kind of crappy to give people a hard time for talking about what you actually linked to.

They've got to be kidding at that price point. $595?!?

Which is pretty high, and I'd guess its more that ergo stuff is a niche market and so the market will bear it than anything, but as mhoye points out there's really nothing surprising about seeing several-hundred-dollar prices in the ergo keyboard market. These things aren't much use to most people, so the customer base is pretty small; and for the people they are useful for, they can be bordering on invaluable. Both of those factors tend to influence price, whether or not it's entirely fair and pretty much totally independent of whether random folks who don't have a pressing need for alternate or one-handed keyboards would buy at that price.
posted by cortex at 8:12 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

Does not totally work.
posted by jeffamaphone at 8:18 AM on May 27, 2010

"I touch type one handed on a regular keyboard (movement issues with my left hand prevented me learning to type the standard way) so I'm not sure what the benefit of half a keyboard is besides a space saver."

It has the potential to be a lot faster because your fingers don't have to move as far.
posted by Mitheral at 8:41 AM on May 27, 2010

Is he making these by hand or something?

Each key is mounted with a double-dovetail joint.
posted by Ella Fynoe at 8:43 AM on May 27, 2010 [2 favorites]

This is perfect for drafting, too bad it's insanely expensive. But I'm sure someone will rip it off soon. Or you might could get a 50$ logitech gamepad with the right amount of keys and kind of macro it up yourself.
posted by edbles at 8:47 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

So I want to try this as a software solution, and apply it to a normal keyboard, where it flips for both the right and left. That way I could do chorded typing with either hand at the same time and double my WPM. That would work, right?

What the worst that could happen? Other than a complete psychotic break as my mind tries to evacuate my head based on what I'm asking it to do.
posted by quin at 8:47 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

So ... what's the intended purpose of this device? Being a wired keyboard it's not really suitable for mobile applications, and for an installation why wouldn't you just use a real keyboard?

Fiddling with the demo I can see how, if I really worked at this to get the muscle memory to where I am with ordinary touch-typing, I might maybe be able someday to get those close to half as fast as regular typing. But I'd rather just use a keyboard.
posted by kafziel at 8:54 AM on May 27, 2010

For $595, I could adopt a third-world child and train him to take dictation.
posted by webmutant at 8:55 AM on May 27, 2010 [5 favorites]

I mean I could see the usefulness of something like this paired with a tablet, in a space-limited environment like a plane. I could. But not if it's not wireless, and absolutely not at $600.
posted by kafziel at 8:58 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

This is perfect for drafting, too bad it's insanely expensive. But I'm sure someone will rip it off soon. Or you might could get a 50$ logitech gamepad with the right amount of keys and kind of macro it up yourself.

Or you could just use a regular keyboard, just like with their flash demo. Any OS that can remap a regular keyboard to Dvorak could easily remap a regular keyboard to work this way.
posted by delmoi at 9:01 AM on May 27, 2010

Seems like it wouldn't be to hard to craft a small program that would interpret the keyboard in this way. Seems like it might make a good project for my computer science class.
posted by daHIFI at 9:21 AM on May 27, 2010

Maybe we should see if dealextreme would consider stalking these :)
posted by Chuckles at 9:26 AM on May 27, 2010

I type one handed on a standard QWERTY keyboard. I started with the old index-finger hunt-n-peck style, and ended up being quite proficient typing with one hand. I used my free hand to hold a cup of coffee while I typed this.
posted by fuq at 9:31 AM on May 27, 2010

magnificent frigatebird: This is really, really hard for me. I touch-type at around 100 words per minute normally, so it's not just that I'm a bad typist. But I can't get this to work at all.

Yeah, I don't get this. I'm a very fast typer, and my brain will NOT do this. I keep having to mentally think out "Okay, so the other side is mirrored like this, so I guess that would map out to... okay..." I mean, what's the fucking point?
posted by hincandenza at 9:38 AM on May 27, 2010

"This is perfect for drafting, too bad it's insanely expensive. But I'm sure someone will rip it off soon. Or you might could get a 50$ logitech gamepad with the right amount of keys and kind of macro it up yourself."

Activating the shift via an extra mouse button would be much better than using the space bar.
posted by Mitheral at 9:39 AM on May 27, 2010

I surprised myself by being able to type pretty OK on the demo. I usually don't catch on to new gadgetry that quickly. What that half keyboard would've been handy for was at my old job, entering information from production reports into my database. A lot of the info was in small print and I had to set a straight edge under each line of information in order to read it without criss-crossing into the next line. So it was set ruler, type info, stop reset ruler, etc. With this keyboard I could've been moving the ruler down the page with my right hand while typing with the left. But not for $600. My boss complained when I spent $1.50 on genuine 3M Post-It Notes instead of buying the off-brand knock-offs for 60 cents at Meijers.

Has anyone ever tried one of these vertical keyboards? I always thought they looked very interesting and might be fun to use.
posted by Oriole Adams at 9:46 AM on May 27, 2010

This was pretty cool... I had to stop thinking about where the keys were on the opposite side, but I picked it up pretty quickly.
posted by antifuse at 9:52 AM on May 27, 2010

I keep having to mentally think out "Okay, so the other side is mirrored like this, so I guess that would map out to... okay..." I mean, what's the fucking point?

You may (or may not) have more luck if you try and strip your thinking down to just "left hand or right hand?" and make whether-you're-holding-down-space-bar how you answer that question mentally, and just otherwise let your left hand do the typing.

This is very lay stuff on my part, I've only done a little reading, but:

There's basically a tendency for the brain to manage symmetrical movements on either side of the body in structurally redundant ways—the neurological process behind e.g. "lift left arm and turn palm inward" isn't wholly independent from the process for the right-arm version of that, in other words. They're sharing some "lift arm, turn palm inward" wiring that's inflected in either case for left or right.

This is part of why we can do things symmetrically pretty damned well without having to think about it hard. It's also part of why developing limb independence when, say, learning to play guitar or drums, can be sort of embarrassingly hard at first—much as you intellectually know you want each arm doing different things, it can take a while to get away from falling back to sympathetic motions in a way that screws up your playing. Sit at a drum set for the first time and try to do different things with two arms and two feet and you'll likely end up stomping and sticking everything at the same time.

See also rubbing one's belly while patting one's head, etc.

But things like this can take advantage of that symmetry—the core impulses for "hit the w key with the left ring finger" and "hit the o key with the right ring finger" are a lot more abstract than that, and basically come down to "extend ring finger just so" which works for either finger with a bit of left/right inflection. So training yourself to let your left finger plus your left thumb type a right-hand "o" on the "w" key is more a matter of getting your brain to trust your left hand to hit the key instead of your right. Which some people may find very natural, others not so much. In some cases folks will likely have an actual significant neurological disinclination toward this ability, but as I understand it really acute examples of that are only common in the case of like brain trauma or cognitive developmental or degenerative disorders.

Another thing to try, along these lines, is writing with both hands, using your writing hand to write normally and mirroring it with your offhand—literally just writing a backwards mirror image at the same time. Give it a shot, it's another YMMV sort of thing but people are often surprised at how well their offhand can do at this odd little feat when they give it a go.
posted by cortex at 10:10 AM on May 27, 2010

It's neat that it's so easy to mirror type - the only mistake I kept making was forgetting to put spaces in, because I was just using the space bar to switch the keys. Brains are so cool.
posted by insectosaurus at 10:15 AM on May 27, 2010

Brains are so cool.

Your brain is. Mine has taken about 8 months to get used to the fact that my fucking laptop keyboard doesn't have Home/End/PgUP/PgDn.

The amount of times I've hit backspace or delete - the least desirable substitute for any of those four keys...
posted by doublehappy at 10:32 AM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

doublehappy, if your laptop doesn't have those keys because it's a mac, see this post on the green.
posted by Thoughtcrime at 11:04 AM on May 27, 2010

(manufactured, it was said, with the last production lot of collapsing-spring switches)

If collapsing spring switches are anything like buckling spring, they're definitely still made by/for these guys, inheritors of the Model M legacy.
posted by kmz at 11:34 AM on May 27, 2010

Mild OCD prevents me from not posting the other half.
posted by nthdegx at 12:05 PM on May 27, 2010

Huh. My entire (real) name can be typed all on the left side of the keyboard without holding the space key.
posted by swimming naked when the tide goes out at 12:47 PM on May 27, 2010

That the immediate reaction of many to a neat brain effect is to see if they can buy it (rather than just enjoy or at most remake it) really says more about us than about the guy charging $600.

For me, DU, it wasn't about wanting to buy it, so much as thinking it would be neat if the real thing actually worked and that it would be equally interesting to try it out if it was priced rationally. The Flash demo does not demonstrate the principle to me at all; I just get garbage. I wouldn't ever spend $600 on the real thing to try it out, as a result. Hope this clears up one person's POV for you.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:21 PM on May 27, 2010

I used a software version of this last year using a program called AutoHotKey when I broke my right wrist and was in a cast for 6 weeks. Adjustment time was in the minutes, not hours.

I used this script I found online:

003: mirror_1 = 0
004: mirror_2 = 9
005: mirror_3 = 8
006: mirror_4 = 7
007: mirror_5 = 6
008: mirror_q = p
009: mirror_w = o
010: mirror_e = i
011: mirror_r = u
012: mirror_t = y
013: mirror_a = ;
014: mirror_s = l
015: mirror_d = k
016: mirror_f = j
017: mirror_g = h
018: mirror_z = /
019: mirror_x = .
020: mirror_c = ,
021: mirror_v = m
022: mirror_b = n
023: mirror_6 = 5
024: mirror_7 = 4
025: mirror_8 = 3
026: mirror_9 = 2
027: mirror_0 = 1
028: mirror_y = t
029: mirror_u = r
030: mirror_i = e
031: mirror_o = w
032: mirror_p = q
033: mirror_h = g
034: mirror_j = f
035: mirror_k = d
036: mirror_l = s
037: mirror_n = b
038: mirror_m = v
039: Return (14.27)

Paired with voice recognition software, it was a very reasonable solution.
posted by discountfortunecookie at 2:56 PM on May 27, 2010

The frogpad people have this patented (at least they used to) and sued someone who made free software to do this on regular machines. This is ancient history though.
posted by chairface at 4:31 PM on May 27, 2010

it made my brain hurt.
posted by filmgeek at 5:13 PM on May 27, 2010

Leonardo da Vinci would have had no trouble with this at all.
posted by bwg at 5:46 PM on May 27, 2010

symbioid: "bwg, I like the way you think :) (this is my dream, in fact)"

Of course we have to hope the brain doesn't develop carpal tunnel syndrome.
posted by bwg at 5:46 PM on May 27, 2010

I'm sticking to wire reels, stenotype and a pool of typists...
posted by gjc at 6:55 PM on May 27, 2010

The biggest use I could see for this would be a specialized netbook. My fingers already are unhappy on most laptops- having a half keyboard with decent sized buttons would be a better choice- combine it with something like a touch screen stylus and it'd be pretty neat.

Still $595 is ridiculous.
posted by yeloson at 8:01 PM on May 27, 2010

For 595 dollars I could afford just to cut off my hands and wire my brain directly into the net!!!!!

I'll do it for $250 and a pizza.
posted by krinklyfig at 9:59 PM on May 27, 2010 [1 favorite]

That the immediate reaction of many to a neat brain effect is to see if they can buy it (rather than just enjoy or at most remake it) really says more about us than about the guy charging $600.

Brains are so cool.

This is a neat effect. I don't, however, see a damn lick of data suggesting that the use of this product has been in any way tested at the neural level.

Brains are fucking cool. Quite frankly, I would go so far as to say they are the coolest. Please do not just associate the word brain with something because you happen to like that thing. Granted, you can make an argument that any old thing is brain-related, but only in the sense that everything you experience is brain-related. Until someone has investigated the relationship between this sort of keyboard and the neurocognitive processes associated with it's use, referring to it as a "brain effect" is the kind of Psychology Today bullshit we could all use less of.

As to the "shame on you for inquiring as to the price of this item" trip, don't cop to Pepsi Blue because it's interesting enough to merit so doing (and I agree, this is totally worth posting) and then chastise people for inquiring about the website's intended purpose.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 1:57 AM on May 28, 2010 [2 favorites]

(Actually) a halved Dvorak, homemade.
posted by RikiTikiTavi at 7:53 AM on May 28, 2010

(...and take a look at how thoroughly they disguise the fact that it's wired on their website - - none of the photos show a wire - - it took me quite some time to find that info buried in a passing reference in the pdf user manual.)

fairmettle, here's my handy-dandy guide to whether or not a computer peripheral is wireless or not:

If it's wireless, somewhere on the front of the packaging near or in the product title it will say, in huge letters, WIRELESS!

(So, yeah, bullshit marketing photos)
posted by IAmBroom at 5:36 AM on May 29, 2010