[svnt]

If you can position things in AR, you can put keyboard keys down on wood grain and the device can tell where your fingers land.

If you can escape the skeuomorphic trap, many things are possible. A mechanical keyboard is certainly not the universally optimal means of character entry.

Maybe not in this rev, probably not at launch based on the video, but keyboards as we know them are due for an overhaul.

[kaba0]

> A mechanical keyboard is certainly not the universally optimal means of character entry.

Funnily enough, I think that this is basically the ultimate limit of touch based systems — humans rely very much on touch, and touch screens’ smooth surface removes every physical hint from the system. Just remember back to how we could compose a whole message blindly in our pockets with feature phones, yet I can’t write a sentence correctly nowadays without constantly looking at the screen.

Now you would even take away that? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the keyboard layout or anything is the optimum, but it is sure as hell closer to it than randomly hitting the table. The mechanical part is funnily being the key part.

[svnt]

It does seem to me there are strong parallels with the iPhone/Blackberry keyboard conversation. Some people will hang on bitterly until the end.

I can thumb touch-type on a cap touch screen with the help of autocorrect. With continued improvement of predictive text and new input methods I think all kinds of things are possible.

Maybe with another technology iteration of haptics you would get positional feedback?

[tsimionescu]

> If you can position things in AR, you can put keyboard keys down on wood grain and the device can tell where your fingers land.

You'll get carpal tunnel syndrome faster than the battery drains if you're actually doing that. One of the main points of keyboards is actually the fact that they absorb some of the shock of typing.

It's actually extremely plausible that the keyboard is the best possible text input method - at least until we find a way to read brain signals non-invasively and decode those into text directly.

[svnt]

My (unchecked) understanding is that carpal tunnel comes about because of the angle of the wrist and the repetitive pushing itself.

If there are no keys to press wouldn’t you have no reason to exert force, and no need to angle your wrist or brace your hand?