Gest

@pfista Why'd you decide to make a keyboard-less keyboard? Did you set out to make that?

@thetylerhayes @pfista Yes, we started with typing, and have since broadened our scope. We we're really frustrated with typing on tiny onscreen keyboards. Tired of seeing "sent from my iphone" at the bottom of emails as an excuse for brevity and typos. As computers get smaller input gets harder. Productivity goes out the window - and that's unacceptable. We set out to build a fundamentally new way of interacting with technology that makes working with smartphones, and even virtual/augmented reality devices, truly productive.

@pfista A little inside baseball on the kickstarter thing - but how did you get your first day pop? Did you buid an email list of people to notify on the first day? Have press embargoes until now?

@scorinth @pfista Exactly right! We grew our mailing list over the last year and had embargoes as well!

@pfista Pretty cool device, but I think one thing we all want to know is..... can I play Rad Racer on it?

@_annacates While it's our vision to replace the keyboard and mouse we know that we've got a long way to go before that happens. Today, we think Gest will be most useful when it supplements the keyboard, mouse, and stylus in the areas where they fall short. For example, say someone is using a Wacom tablet in photoshop. They'd wear Gest on their non-drawing hand and use it for quick gesture shortcuts as well as object manipulation - like rotating objects, resizing (think things like pinch to zoom), and adjust sliders and dials for different effects. We’ve heard a lot of designers value comfort so we wanted something that would be ergonomic, allowing them to create accurately and efficiently but also not have to reach back and forth between keyboard mouse and stylus all day.

@pfista Thanks for elaborating on that. Sounds good. Can't wait to try it ;)

@seysconstantijn The technology is actually pretty simple on the hardware side. We place an IMU on each finger and one on the hand and we use motion processing to get an extremely accurate model of the hand. The hardware simply collects the data and sends it back to a phone or computer that does most of the heavy lifting in software, so we didn't have to do a lot of R&D on the hardware dev. The real challenge with building this device is the user experience. On the hardware side, it had to be comfortable on a wide variety of hands and it needed to fit snugly on each finger so we aren't getting junk data from the sensor wiggling around. We can't afford to personalize them so they had to be one-size-fits-all. And finally, the wires needed to withstand lots and lots of flexing! Hope that answers your question.