Gesture keyboard
- 2. Throughout human civilization , text has been an indispensable channel of communication. Modern computers equipped with desktop keyboards have dramatically increased the ease and volume of text-based communication in the form of email, text chat and web posting. As computing technologies expanded beyond the confines of the desktop,the need for effective text entry on mobile devices has also increased. To a very large extent, the design of text input method define every major product in the evolution of modern mobile computing.
- 3. Mobile phones like apple iphone and recent smartphones use text input method which is now the dominant form of text input. Gesture keyboard is a re-imagination of the conventional key striking-based keyboard. The paradigm have been also known as Shorthand-aided rapid keyboarding(SHARK). To date , different implementations of this novel paradigm have been marketed by a number of companies under the following brands:ShapeWriter,SlideIT,Swype and TouchPal on a great number of devices.
- 4. The basic input action on a traditional keyboard is striking an individual key. On a touch screen another type of action can be used such as a gesture stroke gesture to convey information. A gesture keyboard enhances, rather than replaces,a conventional touchscreen keyboard,letter sequences can always be entered by typing the individual letter keys. Having understood the technical feasibility of word-gestures keyboards,a considerable amount of research was still in understanding the human performance and user experience.
- 5. The fundamental conceptual breakthrough to the word gesture keyboard paradigm is that valid letter combinations form a finite set that can be captured in a language model,created by,for mining emails,blogs,and the web. Since a gesture keyboard enhances,rather than replace , a conventional touchscreen keyboard,oov letter sequences can always be entered by typing the individual letter keys. We first present some of the basic conceptual dimensions,rationales,and principles of gesture keyboards.
- 7. A gesture keyboard is easy to use. Typing on a keyboard is a familiar text input method to most,if not all computer and smartphone users. A gesture keyboard can be viewed as a conventional touch keyboard that also affords gestures. Every Gesture keyboard is still a tapping keyboard. Simultaneously enabling tapping and gesturing behaviour without requiring even a switch,a gesture keyboard imposes a low adoption entry threshold. The users does not have to have learned any gestures before using a word gesture keyboard.
- 8. One of the most important rationales of gestures keyboards lies in facilitating transition from ease to efficiency. Writing with gesture keyboard is a mixture of two types. The first type,used by beginners or for unfamiliar words,is letter-to-letter tracing.Such a process is visually guided closed loop and relatively slow. The second type , used by proficient users for familiar words is memory driven gesturing. This process in contrast is recall-driven,open- loop,efficient and fast.
- 10. In using a word gesture keyboard the production of movements increasingly changes from focusing on individual letters to connecting multiple letters into a word gesture. In regular keyboard typing,users also developed mental word pattern representations. However,in gesture keyboard the word pattern representation is a fluid continuous stroke and visually displayed,which pausibly ingrains the word patterns in users memory much faster than learning common motor control schema for ten-finger printing.
- 11. Many versions of experimental gesture keyoards systems , variable named HSK ,SHARK ,and SHARK2 were designed. One of the first mobile versions of gesture keyboards implemented could store both the gesture and the language model for 50,000 words in 450k memory and return recogniton results with less than 20ms average latency on a phone. A commercial version of word gesture keyboard,shape writer,released on iphone , android and windows mobile platforms in many languages. These systems reflected increased maturity and practically as well as the mobile platform hardware and software constraints at the time.
- 12. Future research is required in understanding user performance and behaviour in word gesture keyboarding. Although a new paradigm of information input has been established and embedded in many mainstream products,this paradigm is still in first generation of evolution. Deeper perceptual motor and cognitive studies are needed.