18-10-2010, 05:15 PM
Keyboards without Keyboards:A Survey of Virtual Keyboards
Prepared by:
Mathias Kölsch
Matthew Turk
ABSTRACT
Input to small devices is becoming an increasingly crucial factor in development for the ever-more powerful embedded market. Speech input promises to become a feasible alternative to tiny keypads, yet its limited reliability, robustness, and flexibility render it unsuitable for certain tasks and/or environments. Various attempts have been made to provide the common keyboard metaphor without the physical keyboard, to build “virtual keyboards”. This promises to leverage our familiarity with the device without incurring the constraints of the bulky physics. This paper surveys technologies for alphanumeric input devices and methods with a strong focus on touch-typing. We analyze the characteristics of the keyboard modality and show how they contribute to making it a necessary complement to speech recognition rather than a competitor.
INTRODUCTION
Touch-typing or machine writing was invented for mechanical typewriters which had the current QWERTY key layout since 1874. While this interface is come to age, it survived because of its many positive aspects. Yet it is not feasible for the ever-smaller computing devices that house ever-more advanced functionalities. New alphanumeric interfaces include numeric keypads augmented with letters as on the cell phone and the Graffiti handwriting characters.
Here, we survey the state of the art in alphanumeric input interfaces. After an overview of the related work in the area in section 2, we lay out the general space of interfaces for text input in section 3. In the following section we discuss characteristics and human factors of touch-typing in particular. Section 5 explains the criteria we examined with. Section 6 introduces and compares various touch-typing input methods and devices. We conclude with stating that keyboards – whether virtual or real – are very well suited to the task of alphanumeric input.
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http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/dow...1&type=pdf