I must say that I’m impressed with what Waytools is trying to do here. Frustrated with the delays and lack of product, but impressed none-the-less. Yes, I’m in the TREG group, but nothing below is any special news. I’m not trying to be speculative, or overtly support Waytools in a particular way, but rather to provide my personal views on what this technology is all about. I am interpreting a bit from the call that I had with Mark Knighton, but not much.

First, consider the humble keyboard. Basic arrangement has been around since 1870s. Lots of tweaking on the key arrangement, but not much more. What’s interesting is that a keyboard serves hands that have a huge variation. Large hands, small hands (no politics intended). If you care to read a lot of geeky detail, you can find an interesting paper about the variations in hand size here: Patterns of Hand Variation – New Data on a Sardinian Sample

http://hrcak.srce.hr/file/43148

The gist of the report is that the human hand varies substantially. Finger lengths are different male to female and left- to right-handedness. The index finger may vary in length (+/- 3 SD) by +/- 10mm within each group, more across groups. And this is just for adults. Perhaps very young children won’t be using a Textblade, but I could imagine children would be using one by age 8 or so, maybe sooner. The new straight-line layout will also change how people type.

Another thing about this keyboard is that it needs to be able to sense the finger position even though the finger isn’t touching the sensor. The sensor element is in the base (below the butterfly mechanism). The keys do not contain sensor elements. In order to determine which key is pressed, the sensors need to understand where the finger is when the key goes down. You know those non-mechanical buttons that sense when you touch them? Like a Magic Mouse or perhaps track pad or elevator button? They use capacitance to determine the presence of a finger. The Textblade must sense the position by capacitance as well. So consider the capacitance of the human body. The capacitance of a typical human body varies by 60%

See this article: http://home.mit.bme.hu/~kollar/IMEKO-procfiles-for-web/tc4/TC4-15th-Iasi-2007/Final_Papers/F191.pdf

This is a pretty large variation in how the sensors need to determine the finger locations. There must be a complex dance in how the finger positions are read out and the depth that the key needs to be pressed in order for the finger to read as present, but not the letter below it… for example. And the capacitance of my body will shift from day to day and perhaps hour to hour based on how much water I drink, what the room temp/humidity is like, etc.

So, these two elements of pretty extreme variation in how the human body interacts with the keyboard must have something to do with how difficult it is to make this thing work correctly. I imagine that there are many more elements such as timing, battery life, bluetooth communication and such that go into making all this function the way that Waytools expects. Of course, much of this is covered by WT’s patents, I’m sure.

All this is why the instrumentation software is so necessary to responding to customer-reported conditions where the keys aren’t read correctly.

I have more written about why this is an argument that they should release early units, but l realize it just becomes an echo chamber. Let’s keep this topic about the technology.