Air-Keyboard

A year ago, Marie had a dream that one day she could walk in the park while typing her midterm paper in the air. As she thought about how to create a way to type quickly without a keyboard, she had the idea of using gloves with sensors to detect the motions of typing. Lacking the hardware knowledge to create the gloves, this dream was put on hold. Until Friday night...

Marie was thrilled to find precisely the gloves she needed at the NSA sponsor table! Skipping for joy, she rounded up her fellow women in computer science to begin the project of her dreams.

The original dream was to simulate typing on a qwerty keyboard. It took until Saturday night to successfully read the sensor data from the gloves. Starting at about 11pm Saturday night, we began calibrating the gloves to interpret mimed keystrokes. Due to the late start, we decided to set a simple goal of typing the word BITCAMP. After successfully programming the right hand according to the qwerty format, we were stumped by how to connect two gloves at the same time. So we altered the plan to use only the right-hand glove. This meant we had to come up with alternate finger positions to represent the left-hand side of the keyboard on the right hand. We attempted to use the thumb as a toggle for left and right sides but encountered issues with accidentally triggering unintended letters when toggling. As a temporary alternative, we decided to place the left-hand letters of BITCAMP in the unused finger positions on the right hand without a toggle. So here you see these 7 letters represented on 4 fingers, also known as Air Keyboard 1.0.

We intend to build our own set of gloves for our club and continue to refine the Air Keyboard. One day, we hope to achieve the dream of a full qwerty Air Keyboard.