Now you have to look at CharaChorder’s device. They're trying to reinvent the keyboard. I hope to hear your insights from that.

Thank you for this video we was wondering

@@R.N.GPerformance my pleasure : D

I swear I saw something similar or it was this on Pimp My Ride ages ago, I thought it was so cool..but even back then I thought it can't be as good as an actual keyboard.

@@sdewey4152 I only ever saw something like this in a Law & Order / CSI episode, thinking "oh yeh, TV magic", never expected them to be real XD

Wow i have similar stockpile too, massagers lasers scifi boxes.. :)

From my family's bad example I learned NOT to stockpile gadgets I suspect I'll rarely use ;)

Massager goes brrrrrr

That's what my brain immediately went to as well

Yeah, definitely never heard of this product referred to by it's actual name but I saw these a LOT on gadget websites.

Same here.

That's where I saw it. I used to order lots of t shirts and other stuff from them.

I saw the TedxTalk with the creator of the technology and his teacher, he wore the device on a lanyard and demonstrated the light based keyboard and explained how the camera imputed the letters when he pressed on the lightboard so to speak, it was clever I thought

They… did not have an option to turn it off?

@@musaran2The one I had which was a knockoff of this one I think (it was very cheap and very Chinese) did have a mute function. Trouble is, without that beep you had absolutely no feedback that a key was pressed which messed with your perception when hunting and pecking as you had no idea if the press had been registered. The mouse mode worked very well though.

Fricking sharks with Fricking laser beams attached to their heads!

You know what these comments and comedy have in common?

@@rukitomikutochi8764 laser

Fricking awesome

It puts the lazer on the skin or it gets the desk again 🤔

I remember one of these at the Office Depot I worked at too, except when the sun was setting, it would keep thinking a "key" was being pressed when it was the shadow of the automatic doors.

I'm surprised he didn't mention that.

@@soaringeag1392 That would really enjoy Mr. Spock whenever someone comes in from the turbolift.

That would've been a great use case before touch screens and the like became ubiquitous

What do you mean? I can still type like that on my phone

Oh wow, the name ThinkGeek really brings me back. I remember ordering one of those terrible Chinese MP4 watches that came preloaded with a Crazy Frog music video.

​@@marknielsen9315 did they work?

You can swipe type on IOS. Wtf kind of phone are you using?

2024 and I'm still using the Swype keyboard. I'm a dinosaur, sure, but I like it.

Out of curiosity, what was there to "drive"? Naïve me expected just standard wireless & keyboard communication. Were there configuration & options?

@@musaran2 It predates the Bluetooth keyboard standard, so it used a bespoke protocol.

Know where it would be a cool and actually useful product, to replace a remote control for a TV. just pin it on the ceiling and project the buttons on the sofa.

I saw it as some not too practical prototype product and hoped for updated versions/adaptions.

@@monad_tcp Seems like it would be too easy to trigger by accident, and also the buttons/keys would be huge at that distance.

@@Jdbye that makes it even better for TV

That was an Aussie show iirc, the UK equivalent was the BBC`s tomorrow's world. Both were great shows. Always wondered what became of the heatproof gel a guy in the studio coated his arm with then blowtorched it and had no burns.

@@meetoo594 A short-lived US equivalent, called _Beyond Tomorrow,_ ran from 1988-1989. (Apparently, the same title was used for a 2005 _Beyond 2000_ revival.)

@@davidlevy706 I vaguely remember that one as well. Here in the UK both were transmitted on one of the Sky Satellite channels.

I remember that show! I really liked it when I was a teen!

Originally this show came out in the early 80's in Australia and was called Towards 2000. As it go closer to the year 2000 and the show is about future tech they renamed it Beyond 2000. It was a great show.

That's where I knew it from kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gM5mlc-p0dTdm4E.html

You don't know the half of it! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/Z6mpZMeB0dWcfqM.html They sound cool but they're absolute dogshit.

The only place ive seen it. CSI Miami, a secretary was using it to upload to a blog or something in secret.

yup, i saw it on csi as well. i assumed it was just some made up tech. those shows had quite a lot of fake tech for the sake of tv

That’s it! It was CSI where I saw it!

@@Fladens yeah, i rememeber this episode, and they couldn't figure out strange fingerprints on glass (?) table and then they found out about this device.

😂 yeah csi miami you are correct

Yes! I had one of those too. Used it to write notes on my Visor at University until unfortunately one of the ribbon cables inside it broke. 😢 I have never been able to find another portable keyboard with the same design. All the folding keyboards out there now seem to be cheap clones of a few established designs with only one or two hinges and that don’t compress the keys to fold even smaller.

I also had a Visor with that awesome folding keyboard!

My guess is that if you do pursue it, the original patents have expired by now.

IIRC, I think this was the original mission of Windows Surface.. "screenless" tablets on any surface

@@unbearifiedbear1885 No, the original Surface was a big-ass touchscreen coffee table for teamwork. Then they reused the name for tablets.

No kidding. I sometimes use a touchpad if I'm getting too much strain on my wrists from using mouse. While touchpads are cool (except for the part where "cursor coasting" appears to have gone extinct in the last 10-15 years), they're much less cool to actually have under your keyboard. A compact laser-projection touchpad that would project to space under the keyboard would be pretty neat.

The issue overall with the product, to me anyway, is if it ever made it to mainstream adoption, it would have died under a mountain of lawsuits pretty quickly thanks to the laser. I don't know how powerful it is, but Ken says in the video it hurt his eyes to look at, and anyone who has looked at the "mad laser scientist" section of youtube has been told you don't need to look right into the diode to damage your eyes. The light reflecting off a surface from this product was clearly not safe to use without laser safety goggles. And really, who the hell is gonna pull out laser safety glasses every time they want a track pad? And that's before you consider someone's kid grabbing it and going "oo pretty red light" and staring into it.

I've been on a job interview at some company where I would had led development of such a device. Seems they went bankrupt faster than the ink on the contract could dry. Don't remember when that was, must have been like the very late 1990s. In any case, there was no laser involved, just a regular projector. And the projection is only for the benefit of the user, it's not really needed for the function. A camera would watch for the finger. Recognition of a "click" would have been based upon gesture recognition, or, as an alternative, by watching the shadow. A blurry shadow means "no click" while a sharp shadow means "click". The shadow thing can't work with a single point-source light (like sunlight), so I think they wanted to use artificial IR illumination. Now, for the "click" recognition to work, you can't just slide your finger across a surface like you do with a touchpad. You need to lift the finger for a "tapping gesture", like you do on a touchscreen nowadays. And, like on your phone's touchscreen, careless finger movements may lead to an, ah, "inconvenient rearrangement" of stuff on your screen. Unlike with a mouse or a traditional physical keyboard, you cannot rest your hand upon it, making it somehow less convenient, especially for extended/prolonged use. Due to camera limitations, the "virtual touchpad" needs to be quite large if you want reasonable accuracy (well, at least in case of the device where i did the job interview for; they wanted absolute positioning, like on a touchscreen, not relative positioning, like with a mouse or a touchpad). It would have been useful to convert a video projection into a touchscreen. MS Kinect and similar systems have been around, for the consumer market, since at least 2010. Kinect also uses a camera to track the motion, plus a source of "structured light" to receive depth (distance) information. And while MS Kinect is the next generation interface to enable , it is about as inconvenient to use like the desktop computer touchscreen (yep, remember that the Windows 8 UI was based on the idea that you no longer use a mouse but comfortably smear your fingers along your upright 42" touchscreen sitting on your desk?). YMMV for gaming purposes, though. Now, the real killer is: why would you have a some "virtual mouse" slab sit on you desk when you could simply use a Bluetooth mouse? Maybe not one as tiny and unsexy as the ZeroMouse...but then again, you could secretly hide a ZeroMouse in your palm while pretending that you're using a laser mouse.

that would be even worse why would you carry something the size of a portable wireless mouse around, only for it to cost 30x the price of a regular mouse and function half as well

@@klausstock8020 That was way more informative than anything I expected to see in KZfaq comments. Thank you. And I recall skipping Windows 8 because I thought the UI looked "god awful", and it may have been the start of my incessant complaining about stuff being optimized for touch screens. Why would I want to poke the screen and get it filthy when I can grab a mouse and click stuff and still see the screen?

Another laggard here, I like waiting for technology to mature, and feeling out how reliable and useful new technologies are before jumping on board. Also these cutting edge products get cheaper as time moves on, so you get better value for your money. Early adopters end up paying premiums for unreliable fault-ridden products unfortunately.

I'm with ya. I still use vista, simply cause it hasn't died and is still fast enough for me. I use everything until it simply can't be fixed anymore.

@@theussmirage so Tru I learned overtime although I did buy a ps5 at launch jus cause

I'm right there with you. When my Windows 7 laptop bricked, I switched over to Linux (Mint) not because I knew what Linux was, but because it was 1- free, and 2- almost exactly like Windows 7. I still buy DVDs and CDs and physical games whenever possible because I will never hop onto the "renting media is better than owning it" bandwagon, but I still like seeing other people spend their money on flashy things I'll never want or need.

another laggard. I got burned a couple times on new tech and now wait till gen 2 or 3 to avoid being a Betta tester.

You never know; maybe the new ones have fixed the issues!

@@calorion maybe so, yeah! but I seriously doubt it ..

in my experience it can type okay* the surface the light is shined on has a big effect with how the device reads your input. The one I have has the option to turn up or down the brightness of the laser which can improve typing depending on the surface or typing on. Also hunt and peck to be the best option because if you think about it the way it works it's detecting you breaking the light path from where the laser is more fingers means more chances for it to miss read your input. Ultimately it's a fun novelty if you can pick it up for like 10 or 15 bucks

@@calorion Besides the lack of feedback for the key presses and questionable accuracy you also don't have any kind of physical frame of reference like on a phone or tablet keyboard, and you had to be able to find a table with enough space to use it With virtual keyboards on devices you can get used to your finger positions quite easily and consistantly to type without needing to look where you're typing because you hold it a certain way or can feel the edges which places your hands and fingers in a consistant fixed position. But with the laser projected keyboard you lose all consitancy, even if you go out of your way to get some kind of frame of reference before typing like setting your wrists down at a certain spot or setting it a certain distance from the edge of a table, you're always prone to drift in several ways which causes you to contasntly need to readjust to keep any consistancy

@@Oleg-oe1rc The lack of feedback issue, at least, would seem easily fixable. It could blink the key you pressed as you pressed it.

henad turner

Interesting! That sounds like a good fit for a product like this, but I suppose I missed that… or I just forgot. : D

I remember a kid bringing one back in middle school. He used it on his ipod touch during lunch..lmao

@@0x1EGEN Tap on the table top for "Mom, we need more peanut butter and jelly"

Fascinating behind the scenes news there. Thanks!

Imagine how chunky it would be to have a working computer with it.

@@f.i.b3027 Could have snapped it to phone with a small tripod stand.

@@editingsecrets the thing is, nobody is really asking for this since if you have a table, you can just bring and fully working laptop.

@@f.i.b3027 Agreed!

Could have been like Apple's Touch Bar.

Except the Magic Cube wasn't made by a scumbag scammer... 🤔

True. At least this was a real product. I don't want people thinking I only talk about scams. 😅 There's many other important things in the world.

@@ComputerClan sorry I do understand what you are saying.

@@ernestmeiehofer no apology needed. All good : D

I even question the usability for a network technician. Yes, I am talking about the case some appliance fails to boot, is not accessible via SSH or anything remote. The appliance is, of course, (since this this is an industrial setting) "installed" in some dark and tight corner. The hapless technician might be confronted with pointy protrusions from some machinery, or a garbage pile on top of the appliance, and about anything else, but the one thing which is notably absent is a flat surface. Luckily, this is not my line of work. Well, okay...it sometimes is. So I have a small compact wired USB keyboard, plus a wireless keyboard-touchpad combination (not Bluetooth, but with a dongle, so no driver needed). Yes, I usually work mouse-less. But there's one machine with a GUI application which can only be used with a mouse. Yes, the programmer must have been real talented to figure out how to program an "OK" button which cannot be accessed with any keyboard navigation or shortcut. Hence the trackpad. I can hold the keyboard in one hand and type (or move the mouse pointer) with the other hand. The only good thing is that this machine sits in the pointy department, not in the trash department. I guess that, as a network technician, you need to be happy about the small things in life.

@@klausstock8020 I couldn't imagine trying to use a shell or command prompt using a keyboard with less than perfect accuracy. What a nightmare!

Plot twist: It was real!

You've got a bright future in business consulting! That's a $500 meeting agenda right there!

@@editingsecrets God I don't know what's worse, the bitter sarcasm of your reply or the fact that it's depressingly completely correct

Yes, thank you! I couldn't remember in what tv-show i had seen it, but i knew for sure i had seen it on tv.

Or, put out a $5 keyboard at the kiosk with a $1 washable or disposable clear plastic cover on top

I think you can safely buy a laser keyboard now without too much worry about depreciation

Following him by the light of his laser keyboard