Typin’ to the Oldies

In today's world, many people spend long hours sitting in front of a computer screen for work. This sedentary lifestyle can have negative effects on their health, leading to issues such as weight gain, back pain, and poor posture. However, maintaining good fitness habits while working at a computer all day can help mitigate these risks.

To help individuals stay fit while working at a computer, experts recommend taking frequent breaks to move around and stretch. Sitting for prolonged periods can lead to a decrease in blood flow and cause muscles to stiffen, so taking a break every hour or so to stand up, walk around or do some stretches can help alleviate this. Simple stretches like neck rotations, shoulder shrugs, and calf raises can all be done at the desk.

In addition to taking breaks, incorporating physical activity into the workday can also help. But exactly how one chooses to get their exercise can vary greatly from person to person. YouTuber Everything Is Hacked is much more in the Sweatin' to the Oldies camp than the Sit and Be Fit camp, so he came up with a very active way to use the keyboard. He created a full-body keyboard that uses computer vision and machine learning to translate body poses into keystrokes.

It may not be even a little bit practical for getting actual work done, as Everything Is Hacked freely admits, but it is an opportunity to get some exercise and look like a jazzercise pro all at the same time, and that sounds like a win-win! Well, it might sound like a win for somebody, somewhere, anyway. We have not found that person yet, but there are almost eight billion people in the world, so there are probably one or two.

The project is called Semaphore, because the system uses flag semaphores to encode letters and numbers. Some additional poses are included to represent various special keys. OpenCV and MediaPipe's Pose detection software packages are leveraged to detect keypoints on the body as the user stands in front of the camera. Everything Is Hacked then wrote an algorithm to interpret those keypoints and translate them into flag semaphores.

Unless you happen to be a Navy crewman, the flag semaphore system probably is not in your vocabulary. Everything Is Hacked had to learn it for this project as well, so it was very slow to enter data in this way. He had the idea of setting the typing to music to help him commit the patterns to memory. Through this trick, he hoped to achieve the typing speed of at least a hunt-and-peck style typist.

With some work, he did. Kind of. Everything Is Hacked only “typed” the first letter of each word in the songs, but was able to achieve a rate of 31 words per minute after a good deal of practice on Johnny Cash’s I’ve Been Everywhere. As a stunt (since the rest of this project is most definitely completely serious), Everything Is Hacked got two more people together to all type at the same time as him. This got the typing rate up to 55 words per minute.

A word of caution for anyone that might seek to duplicate this project — jazzercise can be hazardous. Everything Is Hacked injured himself from the repetition of certain poses, but he channeled his inner Kerri Strug and powered through to create this Internet gold.

On a more practical note, Everything Is Hacked pointed out that Semaphore can also be used to control games with body motions. He plans to update the system to, for example, allow a punch in the real world to trigger a punch in a game. Be sure to follow him if you want to be one of the first to see this future project. Or, if you do not want to wait, you can check out this project today.