Blowfish12: Touchscreen

Friday, June 8, 2012

Touchscreens learn your habits to help you type faster

TYPING on a touchscreen is a slow and error-strewn business. Keyboards that adjust to individual typing styles could ease the frustration, or reduce the mistakes you make as you walk and type.

Lack of physical feedback makes touchscreen keyboards difficult to use. All parts of the screen feel the same, so it is easy to miss a key. But touchscreens have an advantage over conventional keyboards - the layout can be adapted to suit different typing styles.

Leah Findlater at the University of Maryland in College Park and Jacob Wobbrock at the University of Washington in Seattle asked 12 people to type a series of phrases on a screen-based keyboard that logged the position of each tap. This data highlighted quirks in style that can lead to errors. For example, a user might hit the bottom of a key rather than the centre, making it easy to strike the key below by mistake.

Once the system had identified these quirks it adjusted the layout of the keyboard in a bid to reduce errors. If a user regularly hit the bottom of a key, its position might be lowered. Or the space bar might be enlarged to make it easier to strike with either thumb. Personalizing keyboards had a significant impact. Users typed 15 per cent faster after three sessions with the adjusted keyboards, however there was no change in accuracy.

A similar approach can help reduce the errors that crop up when typing and walking. In a second experiment, in conjunction with Wobbrock's colleague Mayank Goel, the team asked 16 people to type on an iPhone whilst walking. Readings from the phone's accelerometer were logged and compared to typing errors, which uncovered the source of some mistakes. When a person's foot strikes the ground, for example, their taps tend to shift towards the centre of the keyboard.

The team used that data to design an iPhone keyboard that tracks accelerometer data and tap position and corrects those taps it thinks were made in error. Tests showed that the software, known as WalkType, improved typing speed by 13 per cent compared with a regular iPhone keyboard. Error rates fell from 10 per cent to 6 per cent. Both ideas were presented at the Conference in Human Factors in Computing Systems, held last month in Austin, Texas.

Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.

Touchscreens learn your habits to help you type faster (newscientist.com)

New Touchscreen Features Disappearing 3D Keys (bigthink.com)

Buttons Morph Out Of Your Touchscreen With Tactus (singularityhub.com)

Morphing touchscreen lets you feel the keys (newscientist.com)

Touchscreen With Buttons? New Tech Promises End To Virtual Keyboards (huffingtonpost.co.uk)

New Technology Adds Keyboard Feel To Touchscreens (informationweek.com)

!lker yoldas. )°(: Tactus Technology unveils touchscreen prototype with appearing and disappearing keys (hands-on) (theverge.com)

Morphing touchscreen lets you feel the keys (newscientist.com)

Tactus Creates Touchscreen Keys You Can Feel (fastcompany.com)

Tactus Amazing Touchscreen Tech Generates Physical Buttons On Demand (simplyzesty.com)

Morphing touchscreen lets you feel the keys

Love your smartphone but miss the feel of a real keyboard? Now you can have both, thanks to a new tactile touchscreen that morphs to create physical buttons.

Developed by Californian firm Tactus Technology, the new screen contains a tiny layer of fluid that deforms it to produce buttons of a given height, size and firmness. They act just like a regular keyboard, but disappear back into the screen when no longer needed.

Tactus demonstrated its touchy-feely screen on an Android tablet at the Display Week conference in Boston yesterday. The Vergereports that the keys need to be arranged in a predetermined pattern, such as a QWERTY keyboard, but Tactus hopes to make the technology more flexible so that apps can create their own specific buttons.

It is not the first time we have seen tactile touchscreens - both Microsoft and Nokia have tried their hand at the tech - but so far no consumer products have emerged. Tactus says you can expect to see smartphones and tablets equipped with the screens launching next year, and further in the future they could also be used in car dashboards and industrial control systems.

Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R. Source: Tactus Technology