If you’ve always dreamed of using your arm as a keyboard for your smartwatch (well, if anyone has ever dreamed that at all), your dream is about to come true. Japanese tech company NEC has released a conceptual ArmKeypad which will work with a pair of glasses and a smartwatch, and will let you type on your arm with a “hands free” method. Okay, it’s not technically hands free but it may be better than typing on a tiny keyboard on your wearable.
While you can actually use other methods to input data on your smartwatch, like voice-based systems, sometimes, that can sometimes be problematic. It is convenient, but if you’re in a noisy area, it can either be unusable or the errors may be numerous. What the ARmKeypad does is to project a virtual keyboard on to your arm, which you can view using a pair of glasses. It is of course connected to your smartwatch and so the data you need to input into your device can be typed out and edited on the app.
However, it is not technically hands-free since you would need one hand to type on it, and then the other arm serves as your “keyboard” of course. It is still much more convenient to project a virtual keyboard onto a surface and have both hands type it out, leaving little room for errors. There aren’t any specs yet, both on hardware and software, but they’re looking at a commercial release by 2016.
NEC is looking at manufacturing, healthcare, document management, and security fields to use this still conceptual product. They should however take another look at how to make this more convenient and maybe even truly “hands free” so as to achieve their purpose.
VIA: SlashGear
