It’s the Xbox 720 controller! It’s here! It’s really here!
Fooled you. *dodges rocks* This is “tagtype,” an ongoing experiment in helping Japanese people input their language into a computer in an easier manner than the conventional method, which is often simply a converted QWERTY keyboard. Inventors-extraordinaire Leading Edge Design started building this as a prototype some years ago and last week displayed a fully-working skeleton model at an exhibition in Tokyo. The system works in the same way as those strange “ergonomic” keyboards you find, with all the keys jumbled about. Research has gone into what keys people need to press most, and an entirely new layout and input method has been formed for tagtype. And I’m presuming the big orange button activates some kind of smart bomb, killing all the enemies on screen at once.
Tagtype’s humble (read: disastrously maintained) homepage [Leading Edge Design]
