02. Space: " "

Concept

The space bar is the most commonly used key on the keyboard - according to research, 6 million space bars are pressed every second around the globe and it gets a total of 18% of all keyboard hits.

With these statistics in mind, we started researching how people type on computers and what kind of habits they’ve formed. It turns out that even the most experienced typists are not able to place the keys in the right location on the keyboard when challenged to do so but can otherwise type with almost 100% accuracy. This shows that typing on a keyboard has become an automated behaviour for us and we can perform this action without conscious thought or intention.

With this project, we challenge the users typing habits by inverting the keyboard and making every letter have the function of a space bar and the space bar being the key for putting out words. It also becomes clear is that fitting all the typed characters into a single space makes it impossible to read. Therefore, the space bar has been given the extra function of pushing the letters into the three-dimensional space, offering a new perspective on how we see and understand space within text editing.

With this project, the space bar has lost its original function but still remains the most important part of the keyboard. 

Implementation

The artefact has been realised with openFrameworks v0.10.1. Without initial knowledge of openFrameworks we started creating a two-dimensional space where each typed character would result in a space. Secondly, a hit on the spacebar would output the previously typed letters in the space of a spacebar. 

After doing so, we wanted to add a new perspective, a third dimension. In technical terms this meant that we needed to implement a moveable camera. One which can be controlled by the user. openFrameworks has an ofEasyCam which has this functionality. 

Our initial setup of vectors turned out to be a useful one, we could simply translate every individual letter over the z-axis. However, when you work in a three-dimensional space, openFrameworks adds a background to every character. This resulted in a less disruptive two-dimensional view, namely only the first letters could be seen, instead of overlapping letters. In order to solve this problem we decided to draw letters differently according to the viewpoint. In a two-dimensional view, the letters are drawn using ofDrawBitMapStrings, and in the three dimensional space we used drawString. 

Code

Download the code here.