Author here! Pleasant surprise to find my project at the top of HN this morning with such positive feedback :) I'm happy to answer any questions or hear suggestions for future tweaks. Planning to make this into a customizable full-body game controller as well.
Can I just say how much I liked the small details here? Like your choice of matching sweatbands, your jazz hands on the last symbol, your choice of pose for backspace, and the commit message, "Updated readme for pedantry". In your honor, I am performing the chef's-kiss gesture. (Which I hope you will include as you add emoji to your input device.)
I hope the video was dramatized and that you didn't actually hurt yourself!
Rather than type every letter, a more efficient system is to represent sounds with keys. This is how stenography works. Each stoke of the keys is mapped to a series of characters; a letter, a grouping (such as 'sh' or 'ing'), or a complete phrase. Using such a system would allow one motion, for example for 'b', to map to a whole word, such as 'be'. Something as simple as that would reduce your risk of injury by something like 50%.
A major difference between stenography and typing is that steno is chorded: the signal is sent when the keys are released, not when they are depressed. I'm not sure how that would work with the full body.
Check out the OpenStenoProject for more about steno. Their community would probably enjoy discussing a full body steno theory (if they haven't already) .
Take care and thanks for all the effort that went into producing the video! It was a lot of fun :)
Completely unrelated, but your comment about stenography reminded me how our French president announced the COVID lockdown. It was a speech full of key information (some I could not hear because when he announced that the schools would close children erupted in yells) but that was not the best part.
The best part was that the speech was also signed for the deaf (that part was normal) and subtitled by a ..., well, ... stenography trainee.
He or she had all wrong, could not keep the speed, was mixing words and skipping whole parts. At some point they seem to have said to themselves "oh fuck it" and were typing more or less random words.
The whole country was with them, hoping that they will go on typing until the end (which they did). That was a memorable event and people actually learned about stenography and the fact that they apparently use a special keyboard in the form of a butterfly.
Interesting, I wonder if you could make a BodyChord or FaceChord setup using steno... Can you actually write code using a steno keyboard - as in, full access to all the usual symbols and modifiers - or would it just be for letters and basic punctuation?
Yes! Here is a really great talk on the state of doing so, with a fantastic realtime demo near the end. Mirabai live-codes using her Plover setup and narrates her thought process as she types out each command.
Amazing! The spoken demo reminds me of Victor Borge's Phonetic Punctuation. This would be such a great way to spend so much time getting slightly more efficient...
I saw her at a keyboard meetup in NYC. She blew my mind with her vim setup: chords representing commands meant that the keystrokes didn't exactly matter: you could have the chord represent an arbitrarily annoying set of keystrokes and have a correspondingly complicated vimrc to handle them. Very cool!!
Please let me know if you want to join forces! You can find my contact information at: https://github.com/mristin.
I figured that I don't mind my kids playing computer games as long as they move. The first stage for me is to find a workable approach to DOS games. In particular, I thought about adapting ski-leu to race games such as Outrun & ilks.
>> I figured that I don't mind my kids playing computer games as long as they move.
These could also be of interest for inspiration as well - basic idea this Youtuber is doing is to use console gamer joystick re-mapper hardware to convert joycon acceleration readings to button presses/button combos.
Can you Lose weight by playing Breath of the Wild? - Ringfit Controller Mod Explained Version
- Today we talk about the Ringfit Adventure controller mod for Zelda: Breath of the Wild. With this mod you can Exercise and play BotW at the same time.
I made a Ring Fit Adventure Mod for Mario Kart - Controller Bending
- Today on Controller Bending we mod the Ring fit controller to play Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with. With this Ring-con mod you have to run to drive. Literally. Squeezing the ring-con activates items!
I'd imagine a lot of similar mods could be done via computer vision instead of using joycon accel readings.
I think the key would be to show up to a gaming console as a PS4/XBox controller instead of just a keyboard. I think there are Python libraries to do this [1] or just stick to Steam games that just need WASD controls. This allows you to tap into already huge library of high quality games and just focus on the OpenCV movement-> joystick button remapping part.
Dance mat could be even easier to integrate as it acts just as a normal joystick. The problem, though, is that many games expect reaction times achievable with a keyboard & mouse, but leg movements are a bit slower.
The problem with the dance mat is that you can not use it in a school class as you need extra equipment. It worked well in a dojo for my judo classes, though.
If you want to run the code manually, install it in the virtual environment. Then you can simply run commands `ski-leu` or `pop-that-balloon`.
Btw., I use pop-that-balloon for basketball dribbling training, and a friend uses it for boxing. Have fun & please let me know if you use it for yet another sport :).
I’ll keep this mind the next time I’m stuck on a burning rooftop and trying to communicate with the rescue chopper. I only hope the pilot understands Semaphore!
As a remote software developer, if this became a product that could be used daily I'd probably buy it. It would be the key link between programming and body exercise.
Have you considered adding an autocomplete? Maybe add in three most likely completions to your word and have three separate signals to select each respectively? Maybe that's cheating, but that could up your words per minute drastically!
Imagine teaching some ML your personal body movements, and then you could have it transcribe text into Semaphore-output video (or live rendering)... At least well enough that Semaphore-input could read it?
I started building a super simplified version of something like this to help me practice flag semaphore, but ended up learning the alphabet a lot faster than finishing that script :o)
Yes, hoping to do something along these lines for a future update! I'm not sure if it would be individual notes/chords per motion, or something based on samples and a looper. If anyone knows of related projects, I'd love to get some ideas for inspiration.
Thanks! Yeah, I definitely chose the easy way over the 'right' way for this version with just setting simple thresholds.
I'm not sure how well it will work yet, but for a game controller I might try to have users record their own custom motions - as in, "show me a few of your chosen [high punch] motions to match against in-game."
