Gameglove

Game Glove

Having grown tired of trying different keyboard layouts that all always felt slightly off, I set out to design a gaming peripheral that felt right.

Objectives

1. Small footprint

This is a perpipheral that will sit along side my normal keyboard so it should be half the size of a 60% at most.

2. Should be able to press the 2 and 3 keys with middle finger

I can't shake this very specific muscle memory, so may as well design around it.

3. Row aligned, column staggered, WASD oriented

I've never been able to hit keys like Z, X, and C reliably. My brain refuses to memorize the meat signals to reach down, then laterally. That led me to at least remove the lateral movement by going for something ortholinear-ish.

Pure ortholinear was uncomfortable for me, but column staggered ortho made a lot of sense. The problem is that most column staggered layouts base the spacing off of home-row hand positioning. This is for gaming, so the spacing should be oriented around WASD positioning.

4. Modifier keys must be larger than 1u

From trying pure ortholinear, my hands felt fairly cramped with 1u modifier keys.

V1

After a fair amount of iteration and prototyping, I've landed on the following.

4x5 + 4 Layout

I liked the look of 6 keys on row 1 and row 5 felt just right at 3 keys.

Row staggered first and last row

Row staggering the first row got me my 2/3 key situation I wanted. The last row was positioned based off of where my thumb comfortably sits.

I cannot stress how much time I spent measuring the thumb positioning. It is maddening how many ways there are to do it wrong.

WASD oriented

I shifted the spacing so that W defines the "peak" of the column staggering.

Modifier key sizing

I changed the shift to be 1.75u to avoid non-standard sizing issues with keycap sets and then right-justified the modifiers to conform to the row-aligned, column-staggered requirement.