CRAZY Keyboard You WEAR! - TAP Wearable Keyboard & Mouse
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,218 words · ~6 min read
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in a world where vr doesn't suck
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and ar is useful enough to actually spend money on it
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one keyboard rules them all
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it doesn't have cords it doesn't have keys
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hell it doesn't even have a board
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so forget everything you know
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because no seriously like just forget it because
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this thing has a learning curve all its own
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cheddar is a post-cable network that focuses on innovative products
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technologies and services check out their youtube channel below and stay
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tuned for more coming later in this video tap the wearable keyboard
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looks and feels totally like sci-fi when
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you first put it on but it's actually very simple to use just take the strap
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out of its charging case slide it over your five feelers and press its one and
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only button to both turn it on and activate pairing mode your computer or
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your phone or whatever will simply see tap as an input device
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but while you might think that it works by moving your hand in space across a
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virtual qwerty tap is not that type of keyboard rather
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than distinguishing characters based on your fingers locations it works by
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assigning each letter or number its own unique gesture you see
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each of these rings has its own 3-axis
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accelerometer which communicates with the thumb unit via a thin wire hidden
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within the strap's fitting cable tap registers keystrokes by measuring
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the deceleration of your fingers as they come in contact with the surface which
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means a you do have to type on something and not
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in the air and b while you can use soft surfaces like the
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couch or a friend's leg hard and flat surfaces work best
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especially while you're learning so what's cool is you never have to look at
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your hand while you're typing something that even the most experienced touch
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typists have to do from time to time with the drawback being that you have to
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learn more than a handful of these tap
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gestures
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the most common letters vowels use the simplest gestures single
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tabs while the most common consonants use two-finger pairs and the complexity
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increases as you go through the alphabet with some of the more obscure letters
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reminding you just how embarrassingly limited your motor skills really are
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fortunately the good people at tap had the sense to include easy shortcuts like
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double tapping your middle finger instead of doing
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this and you're not limited to letters there
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are gestures for most common functions including backspace and enter and you
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can even toggle a numpad but
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having experienced a range of let's call them alternative keyboard
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layouts in the past we know that sometimes no matter how great it is the
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effort involved in learning to use a new board
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just isn't worth it so how does tap compare
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actually it's less horrible than you'd think the team worked with neuroscientists at
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stanford to design a training app that gradually introduces and then drills the
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gestures into your muscle memory they even incorporated catchy little jingles
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to help you remember certain letter groups and the thing really works
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james was able to learn the alphabet and start slowly typing in about two hours with
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most people apparently reaching 30 to 40 words per minute in about five
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now one weird thing is that once you learn
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the gestures on one hand you actually don't need to relearn them for the other
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hand it is oddly easy to switch which tap lets you do in the helpful but not
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actually necessary companion app tap manager
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and there's more tap also has a built-in mouse that you switch on by just laying
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your thumb down and then moving your hand around provided that it works on your desk i
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had to use a mouse mat and that would make tap the most ergonomic mouse
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on the planet if it weren't for the fact that you have
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to lift your fingers to register clicks and to scroll up and down a page
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you can enter continuous scrolling mode by tapping your ring and pinky fingers
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though it's not continuous enough for my liking especially on the phone or you
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can toggle a sustained left click for dragging and highlighting by tapping the
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ring and middle fingers the best part is that there's very
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little latency in switching from keyboard to mouse which is critical
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because you need to lift your hand off the surface once you run out of
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mouse pad which brings us then to the experience
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of using it section of the video unlike the mio gesture armband thing
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from a while ago tap can be reliably
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turned off and on as you switch tasks throughout
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the day so if you're cleaning up you don't have to worry about it registering
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a bunch of keystrokes as you touch something then when you're ready to type
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again the strap is actually pretty good
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at registering the strokes that you intend to type as long as you do a good
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job of typing them it's light enough to be worn comfortably for its entire eight
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hour battery life and it's discreet enough to let you still use your hand to
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use a mouse open doors or
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tap that ass but
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just because tap is pretty darn good for what it is doesn't mean that i'm
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recommending that you rush out and buy it considering that
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you're not going to be faster using tab the use cases that are compelling enough
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to spend 180 on one of these are pretty niche at
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least for now however in a few years when we have you
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know i don't know uh standalone ar glasses and tap has managed to push the
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price down to maybe 40 to 50 bucks i could see a device like this in
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or on a lot more people's hands
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cheddar tv has a wide variety of different segments and over on their
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youtube channel you will find a ton of topics one of them is called cheddar
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explains where they take a particular topic and
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well they explain it you can check out cheddar's video on cord cutting and
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traditional media at the link below they go through and discuss the cable
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industry how it's changed over the past 15 to 20 years and how they're trying to
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adapt so have a look at that video and the rest of their content again through
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the link below so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if
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it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in
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the video description also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community
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forum which you should totally join something even the most experienced
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touch typists have to do something that is
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though the disadvantage is that you will have to learn
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what are you doing right you did
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what is this