Michael,
Just a short note to say:
As I recline with my pen in hand and tablet on the bed beside me, I finally get what you're doing with this interface.
Took a while to get past thinking about what it could add to my modeling (toolset thinking) and get to 'how'.
It's really artist friendly. I love it.
You've given my wacom a new lease on life. It was becoming a glorified mouse mat.
Free from sitting at the desk, you can model with the tablet in hand anywhere the monitor is visable.
With the hours we spend hunched over the keyboard an interface with ergonomics considered early in its design is a timely concept.
More power to you my friend.

Thanks Spinner, I'm glad that you "get it" !

This concept of being able to drive the software while in a reclined-back position is one of the early visions of what I wanted to enable with MoI.

I originally wanted to give the SIGGRAPH demos in a La-Z-Boy type recliner chair, but they didn't have any of those for rent and it would have been a hassle to ship it. I still hope to be able to set that up some day for my demo booth.

I hope that in the future the combined monitor + tablet style hardware (such as TabletPC or Wacom Cintiq) will drop in price, because that is another interesting factor as well.

- Michael

I guess a lot of users are going to want to stick with their current patterns (call for keyboard shortcuts etc)
but I really hope you can keep MoI flexable enough to maintain this for those who do 'get it'.
Input and interface have some amazing developments in store for us.
You could drive MoI as it is now with Jeff Han's new interfaceless interface.
If you're not familiar, heres a link to his debut of it at Monteray.
http://ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=j_han&flashEnabled=1
A friend of mine has just debuted a shirt with embedded sensors that the wearer controls a guitar with by his movements. Puts the music into air guitar! lol
It's a tech demonstrator for part of a smart materials dev group at the CSIRO labs here in Australia.
He predicts gloves on the market in five years.

> I guess a lot of users are going to want to stick with their current patterns
> (call for keyboard shortcuts etc) but I really hope you can keep MoI flexable
> enough to maintain this for those who do 'get it'.

That's the plan. It's been going well so far, I've been able to add several keyboard-oriented features like keyboard shortcuts and numeric point entry without it disrupting the "reclined" keyboard-free usage.

It doesn't cause any harm to add keyboard functionality as a shortcut or as an additional way to do things. The problem is caused when the keyboard is the only mechanism for some basic functionality, which happens with most software through reliance on shift/ctrl/alt modifier keys.

The air guitar shirt sounds really cool! The Multi-touch thing is really cool as well, I've seen that video and got to see it a bit live at SIGGRAPH.

- Michael

"I originally wanted to give the SIGGRAPH demos in a La-Z-Boy type recliner chair, but they didn't have any of those for rent and it would have been a hassle to ship it. I still hope to be able to set that up some day for my demo booth...."

Don't forget the signature of a very comfy lazy-boy... a little bit of duct tape here and there :)