Google Japan Puts Entire Keyboard on One Long Stick

Several years in the past, Google Japan began cooking up bizarre novelty keyboards as an annual April Fools’ Day prank. Most of the creations, together with a working model of Google’s cellular Gboard keyboard wrapped round a cup, are roughly sight gags. They additionally don’t appear to be sure to April anymore. But this yr’s creation might actually have some merit for these of us who battle with cluttered, messy desks.

Despite gaining access to a stack of keyboards providing every thing from whisper quiet chiclet-style keys to mechanical monsters loud sufficient to wake the useless, I have a tendency to stay to the keyboard on my laptop computer for the straightforward purpose that it takes up much less house on my desk—a desk that’s perpetually cluttered with devices, cameras, video video games, and an ever-growing mountain of backup drives. There’s no room for an alternate, or at the least I assumed there wasn’t, till I noticed the Gboard stick.

What Google Japan has completed this time round is just re-arrange the QWERTY keyboard into one lengthy strip, just like the keys on a piano, producing a bodily keyboard prototype that measures in at a whopping 65-inches throughout. But it additionally solely roughly 2.5-inches deep, permitting it to simply squeeze onto the underside fringe of even essentially the most atrociously cluttered workspaces.

Google Japan touts another questionable benefits to the Gboard Stick, together with that it naturally encourages the consumer to stretch their legs and arms to succeed in each final key, supplies a doubtlessly simpler method for hunt and peck typists to memorize the placement of keys. Its measurement additionally supposedly permits two folks to comfortably use it on the identical time, paving the best way for electronic mail duets.

If you don’t assume the Gboard Stick is a completely ludicrous thought, you’ll be able to head over to GitHub, the place Google Japan has shared all of the open-source information that went into its creation, making it simpler for others to both construct one for themselves and even go for a {custom} model with an alternate format.