Era defining gadget, made in FreeCAD!

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realthunder
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Re: Era defining gadget, made in FreeCAD!

Post by realthunder »

DeepSOIC wrote:Do you have a page somewhere to read some more details about your project? on hackaday maybe...
Nope. This is the first public mentioning of this device. I always wanted to at least get the android part working with transforming and everything before announcement. So that I can show people instead of just talking, and easy to get funding as well. But other things just keep coming. And I've taken a big detour lately into the FC internals... I originally just wanted to try out FC Path WB... Anyway, time management is definitely not my strength. I wrote this post on an impulse after stumble into this sub forum and read all those posts. This post may also be a reminder to myself to be more focused, I think.
DeepSOIC wrote:How to input into that device

In the first real thing picture, you can see that there is a green rectangle underneath the outer shell, that's a touch pad about the same size as the one on an average slim laptop. And there are eight physical buttons around it. That's just for one side, the other side will most likely be the same. So comparing to a smartphone, there are plenty of inputs. There are lots of other accessory on the market to augment in this aspect. Like those ring type bluetooth air mouse. I actually wanted to make one myself, but that's for later stage. And yes, voice control, pretty much standard on android now, although it's usefulness is debatable. Oh, and once the other side is ready, and hooked with an intel realsense camera, you can have more complex air gesture control as well.
DeepSOIC wrote:Eye tracking? "Sorry, I can't look at you, I'll screw up my FC project! please wait a bit
:lol: Eye tracking is an interesting area I'd like to explore, which is why I left space for eye camera. But since there are not many devices having this capability at the moment, it is obviously not a mature technology. And you need special camera for that. OmniVision makes them, but they are not exactly friendly to hobbyist. Joking aside, the scenario you describe won't happen. Eye movement is equivalent to mouse movement, you normally need a click action to actually do something. So no trouble here. Eye blink can be used as click. To be safe, a double or triple blink can be treated as a click. And like you said, you can always use other accessory to compliment eye tracking, like using a bluetooth ring to do the clicking instead of blinking.

So for a consumer electronics device, there are plenty way to do input, and I think they are more than enough. However, your are right about the keyboard, especially for programmers, speaking from a heavy vim user. I can't image anything that can beat a physical keyboard when it comes to typing. But we still can have something better than touchpad, such as a chord keyboard, which is simply a bunch of buttons, and you use combos to do typing like playing a fighting game. So, two or more rings on both hand? I've been thinking about this for quite some time.
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ian.rees
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Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2014 3:28 am
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Re: Era defining gadget, made in FreeCAD!

Post by ian.rees »

Very cool, realthunder!

This reminded me of a really interesting UI thing from a while back, which might be helpful for your project: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ . -Ian-
emills2
Posts: 868
Joined: Tue Apr 28, 2015 11:23 pm

Re: Era defining gadget, made in FreeCAD!

Post by emills2 »

Excellent work! i haven't read all the posts yet, but i love seeing this depth of work!

Like you, i have no doubt whatsoever that this is the ultimate direction of computing. VR, laptops, desktop, mobile phones, etc all must eventually converge on pervasive unobstructive displays.
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