Ergonomic workstation idea

I thought of this a couple weeks ago, but was prompted by an Ask Slashdot article to both comment on the question, and write up this idea in more detail.

Basically I got to thinking about the Starfire project again... (which introduced some ideas of which I'm rather fond) and asked myself the question "so with current techology, how much of this vision is achievable?" I decided that a wide variety of I/O devices is a good thing (and would make my multimedia room look really futuristic, to boot :-) so why not just make every one of them available. An integrated solution would be more elegant, but let's face it, it's going to be decades before we can make a large curved surface which is a display with ungodly high resolution, digitizer, and scanner all in one. Maybe it will happen when spray-on semiconductor technology is perfected... there could be a plastic screen with CCD elements sprayed onto its backside, interspersed with wire traces in a grid pattern, and the wire traces would be used to sense the change in capacitance when your finger touches it. The video would be provided by rear-projection. Or something like that. Anyway... back to reality... I've been stewing over what to do with these Macintosh touchscreen monitors that I picked up on ebay fairly cheap; one is in the kitchen, for the rare times I need to read a recipe in there (about twice a year, maybe). I was thinking of using the other as a living-room terminal, but it won't be practical until I develop the metawidget software to go with it; and it really complicates things that I will then have need for a metawidget "browser" for three different platforms: DOS, most likely Linux, and perhaps Mac as well. Anyway if I cut a big hole in the wall at one place where I could mount the monitor, it will stick out into the closet behind, and probably overheat as well as collect a lot of dust and look ugly. I'd much rather put a flat-panel touchscreen in that wall, rather than a CRT. (And I happen to have some of those too... the old 386 Road Rider machines... that's what the DOS metawidget port would be used for.) So I figured it's going to be a long time before I can afford a really big touchscreen for my main workstation, so in the interim I could use the extra 14-incher I have as the horizontal component of the Starfire machine. Anyway it might be more ergonomic to do most of one's touch-screening on a horizontal surface. (Cmdr. Data seemed to think so... remember that workstation he built in his quarters on the Enterprise?) The main monitor should be vertical because you don't have to bend your neck to look down at it... yet if you use it as a touchscreen, you are waving your arms around in midair and it would get tiresome, or maybe it would just be good exercise... anyway the kitchen touchscreen has proved itself tiresome; I put it on top of the refrigerator so it wouldn't get food splattered on it, and even with my arm resting against the refrigerator while I use an on-screen keyboard to operate a telnet session to my Linux box, it doesn't take long to get tired of having my arm up there. So it makes sense to use a horizontal touchscreen as a supplementary device. It also works out well in combination with my metawidget idea, because the use of metawidgets will necessitate separating the "control" part of the model-view-control pattern from the model/view parts of it anyway. It would make it relatively easy to put the controls on one screen and the views on another. Since the touchscreen will be attached to a Mac, it would be best to use a socket connection between the Mac and the real machine (the Linux workstation); I'd also already planned on that, because in a more conventional usage of metawidgets, the views and controls will appear on the same screen, but it will be a remote terminal, a different machine than the one where the application works; like a smarter X-terminal.

Now what to do with the keyboard... the horizontal touchscreen will be located where the keyboard usually goes. I decided it would be best to mount the keyboard a little lower so that there's no chance of putting my arm down onto some keys while trying to hit the touchscreen, and because my keyboard is too high anyway; it's best to have it right down on my lap. Instead of using a drawer, perhaps I could have it flip up underneath the touchscreen when not in use, if the touchscreen is mounted at an angle, somewhere between 20 and 45 degrees perhaps. The keyboard will be out of the way except when I need it, and easy to flip down onto my lap when I do need it. I would then install a left-side "floating" armrest for use when using the touchscreen heavily.

Since the touchscreen will be smaller than my main screen, there will be room alongside it for a trackball, which will be useful for operating legacy applications which do not have a metawidget interface (the majority of them, at first), and I'll use another armrest on the right to position my arm above the keyboard and in line with the trackball. The trackball will be mounted on a ball joint so that I can tilt it outwards a little, and keep my wrist in a natural position rather than strictly horizontal.

There are such things as 3-axis trackballs. The extra axis is twisting - keeping the "north pole" of the ball pointing up and rotating it in the socket. It might be useful for 3D navigation, if the extra axis associated with the least-used axis. But these trackballs are hard to find and expensive. I only found one reference to a manufacturer, and this product no longer showed up on its website, even though I found a magazine review of the product from several years ago.

Oh one more thing about text entry... it might be possible to type quickly by selecting words on a sort of menu system... I believe this was done as an experiment with the PARC TAB device. I think Stephen Hawking's speech device relies on a system like that for him to select words also. It might be amenable to touchscreen use. Or not... Anyway voice recognition will get better, so text entry is going to involve less keyboarding eventually, I hope. But I will probably never want to do without a keyboard completely.