
BendDesk - julian37
http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/benddesk
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mike-cardwell
I'm not convinced that any UI which requires the user to move and stretch
their arms a lot will ever replace the mouse+keyboard. It might be useful for
certain limited use cases like certain types of computer games, but as a
general purpose tool, the mouse and keyboard are much more useful.

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swombat
I think the point of this is that it allows both types of interactions. Steve
Jobs said that multi-touch is not great for laptops because people don't want
to stretch their arms like that. One obvious solution, shown here, is to make
the horizontal and vertical surfaces just one bendy surface, and thus allow
people to switch back and forth between the two without thinking about it.

So for example, you'd have your keyboard on the bottom surface. You might drag
a document there to tweak various bits of it, then when you're done tweaking
you move it back to the vertical half to look at it and scroll through it. At
the same time.

Seems very smart to me. Now they only need to spend the other 99% of the
development time to get the thing to be usable, cheap, reliable, and so on.

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mgunes
I was reminded of the terminals in Sun's Starfire (1992).

<http://www.asktog.com/starfire/>

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Isamu
Yes, exactly. This is a (real) implementation of the Starfire ideas. Not to
detract from it, just an observation.

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ladon86
I was at ITS2010 where this was recently presented. The demo was very nice and
works pretty well. I'd like to see a version with a comfortably angled upper
area and a shorter horizontal area to reduce reaching, but overall it still
worked well.

