TAP Wearable Keyboard: The First Ever Wearable Keyboard and Mouse
The wearable innovations seem to know no barrier to improve our life and enhance our day to day interactions with gadgets and interfaces. The recent surprise has arrived from Tap Systems Inc. with a breakthrough wearable keyboard and mouse that seriously replaced the need to type with keystrokes on a keyboard. You can now just tap your fingers on your thigh and get the typing done on your mobile or tablet or desktop. It just brought a completely new approach to our digital interactions, especially for making effortless type input on all your Bluetooth enabled devices.
It looks Simple, Not Gadgety
Unlike many so-called wearable devices, it doesn’t look gadgety at all. It looks more like a continuous ring strap accommodating all fingers. Wearing the strap around your fingers, you can move your finger quite easily, and while that movement becomes precise taps on a surface, it translates into typing input.
The best thing is it gives a more fabric like design while you wear it around your fingers. For VR headset users and for visually impaired people Tap is equipped to make input easier through haptic feedback. When you can’t see your hands while typing Tap will acknowledge every single input with a quick and easy feedback.
How Does Tap Works?
The small screen keyboard that you use on your mobile devices for making typing input can be replaced by Tap. Besides allowing you to type it also offers a wearable mouse to navigate on any screen. Besides with this simple wearable you can play games as well. When you wear virtual reality headset, you can use Tap for making inputs which allows you to type and navigate without looking at the keyboard or mouse. This shows that even the people with vision impairment can find Tap tremendously effective for digital interactions.
The strap of the Tap offers five holes to wear around five of your fingers. The strap is loaded with embedded sensors that capture the movement of your fingers and hand and accordingly translates this into typing or navigation input on your devices. This smart wearable can be connected to any device having a Bluetooth connectivity and the person wearing Tap can make input by tapping on any flat surface. That means besides the so-called mobile devices like smartphones and tablets you can use Tap with Bluetooth enabled laptops and desktops as well.
Yes, surprisingly Tap just does not differentiate among flat surfaces and their characteristics at all. You can tap on the table wearing Tap or can do just the same on your almost flat denim covered thigh. But when the surface becomes less flat the chances of input or typing errors significantly increases.
Each finger tap will give you one vowel followed by consonants distributed across the five fingers. The combination of finger tapping will make you type with all the letters and make inputs on the screen.
The learning Curve Involved
It is equally a groundbreaking wearable and a challenging input mechanism to get used to the precise combination of finger taps for typing and other navigation inputs. Naturally, for new users, it will involve certain learning curves.
To help users deal with the learning curve, the makers of Tap equipped it with an easy learning game called TapGenius. According to the company, by playing this game initially for some time, the users can learn to master the Tap inputs better. This fun way of educating users through a game seems to be a good idea.
Though it is bound to work differently for different people with their typing habits, at least TapGenius won’t make them feel abandoned and orphan with this wearable tapping strap on their fingers.
The Future
As for the future possibilities, the company has already expressed wishes to extend the functionality of Tap beyond this typing input and mouse navigation. Although Tap’s text input is now only available for English, it has started working to make it available for other languages as well.
Tap Strap is expected to arrive in the market anytime soon, and the company is asking the interested people to join their waitlist through the website to avail the product at the earlier after arrival. Till then, we will be tapping our toes and fingers in wait.
Rajiv Patil is the founder & Managing Director of Nimblechapps, an innovative iPhone app development company. He takes a keen interest in topics related to mobile app development and mobile game development and often like to share his knowledge through informative posts on leading blogging sites.