The Word-Gesture Keyboard: Reimagining Keyboard Interaction

The Word-Gesture Keyboard: 

Reimagining Keyboard 

Interaction

Shumin Zhai and per ola Kristensson

Howdy!

             I am going to present a short summary of the above mentioned article and give my opinion on it.

             In the article, the authors talk about a new text- input system that they developed. The name of the system is ShapeWriter. It is a gesture- based text- input system. Instead of entering the text through the conventional keyboard style, the authors present a novel method which relies on word gestures.

Figure 1

             To type in a word, the user needs to make a single- stroke gesture that goes over all the letters in the word. It is demonstrated in the above picture. The stroke features are compared with the word gesture features and the word that has the highest match is returned. The system also returns the k next best matches in case the recognition is not correct. Following equation is used to calculate the probabilities:

where P(G|W) is the probability of gesture G given word W, P(W) is the probability of the word W and P(G) is the probability of the gesture G.

Using Fitts' Law, Index Difficulty (ID) is calculates in bits using the following equations:

where t is the time to go from letter k to letter k+1, D is the distance between letters k and k+1, S is the size of the (k+1)th key and a and b are constants. 

The total time to write a word is:

where N is the number of letters in the word.

It is also possible to input commands by pressing the command key followed by the command shortcut as follows:

Figure 2

The authors have tested the program with many users and the general consensus about the product has been positive. 

I think that the idea of specifying words by gestures is truly amazing and can be very helpful in increasing the text- input speed and accuracy as there is error correction too. There is a big room for making advances in this area. 

I used the following sources for this blog post:

[1] Magazine. Communications of the ACM CACM Homepage archive. Volume 55 Issue 9, September 2012. Pages 91-101. ACM New York, NY, USA

Thanks for reading my blog! Have a great and blessed day!

Gig'em!!!