Braille

Partially because of #Electromechanical Refreshable Braille Cell but also #Sotto: A Silent One-Handed Modular Keyset and #Neotype: Haptic Computing, I've been wondering what could be done about being able to read the content I enter without requiring to use my eyes.

I'm considering a vertically-read, braille inspired solution, whereby each row -- which can have no dots, a left dot, a right dot or both dots printed -- has it's own specific haptic feedback through 3 of the Tetrinsics. One of the concerns I have is reading speed.

Along with sliding the fingers up/down, it could be possible to instead rest the fingers on the Tetrinsics and they actually move up and give one haptic event per magnet bubble:

Thus, the haptic sensation for a standard 6 cell would be

1. Tetrinsic starts moving
2. Gap between magnets
3. Haptic event (or nothing if there's 0 dots on the row)
4. Steps 2 and 3 another 2 times
5. Tetrinsic slows down (and stops if at the end of the character stream) to mark the end of the character

Now, I can only imagine this would only be useful for when I want to type and watch the world go by on a park bench (or not look down at the screen), as I can only assume the human mind has one processor for this kind of data. Maybe it'll allow writers to look up at the sky and imagine their worlds instead of looking at a stream of characters?

Svalboard inspired layout

I've also been looking for clues inside the Svalboard / Lalboard / Datahand Discord and this KBD article, and am considering a 5 key per tetrinsic solution. This is comprised of 3 zones that the user presses down and two end-caps that act like the magnetic side-keys on Svalboard. 

Mode switching / hopping

I'm starting to notice that there's a lot of states in this finite state machine I'm making here.

1. Character entry (parallel entry / taipo / svalboard)
2. Number entry (for parallel entry / svalboard as Taipo already handles this)
3. Equation / Greek symbol entry
4. Function / macro entry
5. Mouse entry
6. 3D mouse entry
7. 6D (3D + 3D) spacemouse entry
8. Game controller entry
9. Pen / stylus entry
10. MIDI entry (which further has various instruments / synthesiser interfaces such as a guitar instrument actually feeling a bit like strumming the strings)
11. Some kind of haptic reading output mode
12. Run application on Tetrescent

There's about as many modes as on my Casio Classwhiz calculator, and I need to consider a way of being able to hop between them with minimal time and mental-compute overhead.

Height variations

For ergonomic comfort, I'm considering dropping down the outer vertical Tetrinsics: