Justin Simmons
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2017–2025
4:29 · 270K views · May 28, 2016
A scene from Children of Men in which Theo visits Nigel in the Ark of the Arts to get transit papers. It features Nigel's line "I just don't think about it" and a one-handed chorded keyboard.
HN cites it as a film example of chorded input devices and as an analogy for wealthy indifference to suffering.
4 comments from Hacker News
I think the value of the technology hasn't reached a point where it exceeds the inconvenience of using it; namely the bulky headsets and expensive hardware. I agree that it won't be more than a niche technology in the near term future. I guess it all depends on how many more orders of magnitude we can expect to get out of miniaturization before we hit the wall. If it's possible to get a minimum of 4k per eye resolution and the graphics performance of a 2017 high end gaming GPU into a pair of wraparound sunglasses combined with a smartphone, I see it becoming the dominant display technology. The convenience of being able to summon any number of arbitrarily large displays at will is hard to deny, even if you completely disregard any value proposition involving AR and new forms of human computer interaction. I'm sitting in bed with my laptop right now, and if I could choose between reading this on a pair of lightweight glasses or my laptop, I'm not sure what the laptop has to offer. The big issue is touch typing; no (macro) gesture-based virtual keyboard is ever going to be usable for professional workloads. I sometimes wonder if some kind of one- or two-handed finger-chording input could be as efficient as a qwerty keyboard. I would be willing to toss my decades of qwerty experience if I could eventually get something as fast without having to carry around a keyboard. I imagine something like this device from Children of Men: this video (1024 "keys" should be plenty, so it's techn
I keep wondering if chording keyboards could be the answer for VR text input. It would require learning a new input system, but I'm curious if one could eventually become proficient enough to reach average qwerty speeds. I can't remember the name but I remember seeing a google-produced chip that tracked small finger movements, and I imagine something like this clip from Children of Men could work: this video I spent a few hours the other day searching for existing chording keyboards and they were all really clunky.
They're living in the rich cousin scene in Children of Men, where they dine in front of Guernica and the rich cousin says "I just don't think about it." Here's that scene: this video . Sad that billions have to suffer the pollution.
Is this by chance inspired by the one handed keyboard from Children of Men? this video at around 2:05 One of my favorite scenes, by the way.