Fujitsu: Slide your fingertip through our ring piece and show mice the finger Fujitsu Laboratories has unveiled what it thinks is the control system of the future: a smart ring to replace the keyboard and mouse so many of us are slaves to. The 10g (0.35oz) ring contains a near-field communications (NFC) module, low-power Bluetooth, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and other sensors to track the motion of …
Who is going to be the first twat that sits at a desk waving their finger about like a demented conductor. Also what happens when you scratch an itch and all you work disappears into a black hole.
If anything this is much, much more stupid than people wearing google glass headsets.
The device can replace a mouse – waving your finger while wearing the ring can move a pointer on a monitor or heads-up display – and it can be used to write text by drawing letters with your digit.
So, it is basically a wearable stylus, then? It sounds interesting, but not a real game changer. It certainly won't replace a keyboard or keyboards would already be a thing of the past. While non-alphabet languages might do better with something like this, I cannot imagine this would speed up input for someone in comparison. Better speech recognition might.
Now, if it could give us the giant holographic screens that magically interpret the motions of users based on intent that we see in so many Hollywood-style works, then we would be cooking with gas.
> Now, if it could give us the giant holographic screens that magically interpret the motions of users based on intent that we see in so many Hollywood-style works, then we would be cooking with gas.
That's far too energetic! My mouse only moves an inch and a half across the whole screen.
Am I alone in reading this and saying,"Fujitsu? They're still around?"
My first laptop was a Fujitsu, a real tank, running a 486 chip as I recall, but I can't recall seeing a Fujitsu product since then.
Fujitsu have been huge in enterprise-class IT infrastructure solutions and services for many years - they never went away.
Look at any large scale contract our Government has handed out over the last 20 years or so and you won't be too far from Fujitsu - or Utter Failure for that matter.
Knew I had seen this before - and in a much better looking form.
Time to sit back and wait for the lawsuits to start flying, did anyone bring popcorn?
Sketching characters can be a useful input method for some use cases. Palm's Graffiti was popular, though swipe-style touch keyboards seem to offer better performance for most users. (I'm not a fan of touchscreen input myself, but clearly it works for many.)
For logographic langauges, as some posters have already noted, sketch input can be quite useful - potentially significantly faster than keyboard input. Anyone who's used a keyboard to write in a logographic or partly-logographic written language - I've done some Japanese - knows that while there are various methods, they're not ideal.1
But that said, touch devices, whether used with fingertip or stylus, seem more plausible for any extended sketch input than accelerometers. I can't see this replacing existing input devices for most uses. And for alphabetic languages, there's no way character-sketching will ever come close to rivaling input speed and accuracy for experienced users.
1The context-sensitive "guess the kanji from a phonetic spelling and offer a list of alternatives if it's wrong" one I used was pretty nifty, but tended to interrupt the flow of writing and would probably have become quite annoying after a few hours.
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