… Like what is not a very common skill? Touch typing in general? Or doing it under VR specifically?

• The latter would be quite niche I suppose.
• The former? I cry for the current and future generations. It really is not very hard to learn, realistic to master, and incredibly useful in daily (professional and personal) life.

Hey, that sounds very interesting. It’s there anything not working as it should work that hw/sw combo?

Asking because I’ve never had the experience: how does one write anything while wearing a VR set? Please don’t tell me it’s one-finger “Fliegender Adler” on a giant floaty image of a keyboard?

This would utterly kill the comfort, convenience, and speed of touch typing, would it not? Ahh, progress… Even in Minority Report they had (friggin’ sweet-looking!) keyboards alongside their fancy futuristic FAUI*.

^((* FAUI - flailing arms UI)^)

New fear worry unlocked…

Seems like this was done by working out passwords based on figuring out where people were looking and gesturing, rather than looking directly at the keyboard.

As a person using an uncommon keyboard layout, I reckon this would make it harder to hack my typing.

IF I could even get such a layout on wherever VR system I would theoretically be using… 😬

I understand what you say about needing to render every frame, but it’s possible to use a very slow frame rate for the gif (eg. 1 frame every 2s).

Are they evil attack squirrels of death? If so, one should be plenty.

I’m honestly pleasantly surprised to see that this project seems to be rather actively developed.

Which is completely separate from having a meaningful user base (near you), so 🤷

I’m with you, but see a million obstacles (aka. reasons for why things require payments).

You would need some form of moderation, to weed out illegal content as well as simply bots, spam, and dead profiles. Also for message content. I’ve given it some thought and suspect it can be crowd sourced to some degree, but also needs counter balances. Instead of limiting a profile to be live/banned, you could have a percentage score of peer-reported subjective legitimacy (ditto for message responses, heck you could even have a section of outright reviews of the person’s behaviour - although that, again would be subject to abuse and moderation).

Hosting, traffic, etc. would be an unavoidable cost, but can be mitigated with low resolution photos (VGA should be “good enough” for an initial impression, no?)

For sure, an open source solution would offer way more fine grained filtering.

Even if it is eventually exposed as a hoax - that is, not as old as claimed or from a different or untrustworthy source - that works make the book no less of an impressive accomplishment and global mind fuck! 🤯 Whatever it really is, it’s a win.

You know, if you want to replace Slack, look into Mattermost. It’s foss but otherwise pretty much exactly what Slack does so well.

She got eaten by a grue.

Sorry about the surprise prussians. I was never any good at typing on glass, I much prefer an actual keyboard.

The way your comment reads, you’ve been using Windows 3.11 these past decades. 😂

Dune II - basically the grandfather of every RTS game out there (and incidentally very, very different from Dune I): opposing forces, resource collection, tech tree, fog of war, et cetera. Or perhaps it was (not World of) Warcraft, it’s been too long and memory gets fuzzy.

You bought forty types of breakfast?? I don’t think I’ve done that throughout my life.

This seems to be the same version as the OpenBoard through the Play store, so… same?

I did not think Adam Savage had that kind of money to throw around, to be honest…

(that’s a joke; the article does not state the identity of the buyer)

I’m testing with the fastest model on a OnePlus 10 Pro, and speaking 3-4 words incurs a wait time of several seconds, way longer than simply typing them out would take.

Man, you are working really late.

Thank you for this (repeated) question! I will try some of these and collate my experiences.

• SwiftKey

Long-time fan, in spite of privacy concerns. My bar for comparing everything below.

• FUTO

First install, looks promising.

Indeed very customisable. What I don’t like is the (imho) far inferior swipe typing and the need to explicitly switch languages for the keyboard to use the appropriate dictionary. Also, I miss directional buttons for those single-character position adjustments (Futo only offers space-key swiping). Voice typing seems highlighted but I find it to be unbearably slow.

Verdict: will most likely uninstall again.

• OpenBoard

Installation somehow defaulted to “English (Australia)”, but no biggie.

Seems very customisable also, but lacks swipe typing (a deal beaker for me). Relies on the OS language (actually, keyboard) switcher and curiously lacks a shortcut to its settings (requiring the user to go so the rest through the Settings app (which, best-case, is a whopping 5 taps).

Verdict: privacy aside, cannot compete with SwiftKey for features and usability.

• Florisboard

Strainghtforward installation. Seems extremely customisable. No swiping nor autocomplete but both festures are clearly promised for a future release.

Verdict: apart from features promised in the future, thus seems an excellent keyboard.

• Heliboard

Straightforward installation. Language selection included a github redirect to manually download dictionary, which was semi nice.

Proper big-keyed numerical keyboard. Also extremely customisable. Space-key swiping even supports vertical movement.

Verdict: apart from lack of swipe typing, probably the best contender!

• Graffiti

Included because I friggin’ loved it back in the day. The (to my knowledge) only app offering graffiti input is badly broken and crashes immediately on modern Android versions. I remember it working quite well on earlier versions, but that was years ago.