Santiance

Laser keyboard by I-Tech

Cyberglove Motion Capture

I was on the Compiz Forums looking for an area so that I can get onto their Planet Compiz, since I’ve been doing a little bit of development in that area. Then I saw this post titled Creating your own Iron Man (Tony Stark) Desktop and I had to “investigate.”

3D Projection by Liminvision

That led me to these really awesome keyboards from I-Tech. I had heard random rumblings of such things, and the picture here is awesome! I thought Sony or IBM was cooking up something to do with this and a laser tracking system, but this looks really cool, and appears to be available for a modest price ($150).

Cybergloves seem to be a adult version of the Power Glove, whatever difference that is. I don’t think anyone is going to put a glove on and look like a jackass for another 10 years, but it might happen. In all seriousness I’ve seen these systems before and they are kinda neat. Power, Cyber, whatever. Good luck finding drivers for any glove!

The horrible VirtualBoy console. Now with more than one way to cause a headache!

I had already seen the 3D projection thing that Luminvision is providing (or at least technology very similar) in Portland at the mall. I saw some kids playing with it and it seemed like it could be interesting. I think most of us adults are too lazy to do anything like that. It’s not much of a stretch to say that the jackasses wearing those gloves will probably be the ones kicking these pixels on the floor like a dog attacking a laser projector.

Which reminds me, are lasers the best thing to be typing with? What happends if you put a CD down on top of where your keyboard (which is now lasers) was? Does the reflection somehow register sudo rm -rf / ? If you use that thing for a long time are you going to get typing lines?

All this stuff kinds reminds me of the Nintendo gadgets coming out in the 80′s, like the Power Glove, then in the 90′s the super-failed VirtualBoy. Not to be confused with the super-awesome VirtualBox. I waited in line for hours in the freezing cold (you know your getting old when you start stories like that) to get my nefews a Wii a few years ago, and from what I can tell those games are heavily restricted. It’s interesting that Nintendo is trying to go with a new direction, but I think they ended up like this SNL skit.