'Sensiqwerty' (collaboration with Alex Lough) is an experiment in sensorimotorically enhanced computer interface design. The project is premised on decades of building embodied interfaces that attend to sensorimotor subtleties of normal human embodied performance, often excluded from conventional interfaces. ‘Traditional’ computer keyboard interfaces are binary––key states are ‘on’ and ‘off’. In 'Sensiqwerty', we have enhanced a conventional qwerty typing keyboard so it is sensitive to key pressure and duration. The principle of user friendliness in computer interface design has tended to reduce complexity of user actions. As such they ‘dumb down’ sensorimotoric capabilities of embodied users. Sensiqwerty accesses expressive potential of hand action - at the cost of demanding more skill and control from users.
As a creative technology, it has several applications:
Discussion
Sensiqwerty is a research project/work-in-progress by Simon Penny and Alex Lough. The idea arose as a result of consideration of rich dynamics captured (mechanically) by a traditional piano keyboard considered in comparison to the (intentionally) impoverished range of dynamics captured by the modern computer keyboard. The talk will demonstrate different graphical and acoustic output of the system and describe its design.
In its first prototype version, Sensiqwerty captures pressure and duration data and, for graphical display converts these values into type size and grayscale value (see fig 1). The data can also be applied directly to pitch and amplitude values in a phoneme generator. The first prototype was developed with a Sensel Morph pad in Max. The second prototype uses a Wooting One pressure sensitive keyboard (developed for gaming applications), with custom code.
As a hardware/software interface system, Sensiqwerty is envisaged as having three kinds of application. Most prosaically, casual ‘demo’ interaction provides experiential evidence about user sensorimotor skills (see image). Second -as a writing tool, when used with some experience and virtuosity, it permits the generation of expressive text that is a kind of digital corelate of calligraphy, a new genre of digital concrete poetry.
Thirdly, as a component of live multimedia performance, it can be used to drive phoneme generators and other digital instruments directly. It can also be used to create a kind of live, improvised graphical score for improvisation. In such temporal and dynamic contexts, the text will itself be ‘live’ or animated in the following way: keystroke attack and decay duration will be (intuitively) translated into fade-in and fade-out effects for each character, so each character on screen will have its own specific ‘life-history‘.