Gesture Keyboard - User centered design of a unique input device for Indic
Scripts
Ashish Krishna1, Rahul Ajmera1 | Sandesh Halarnkar and Prashant Pandit |
Human Factors International | HP labs |
4th Floor, Chemtex House | 24, Salarpuria Arena, |
Hiranandani Gardens | Hosur Main Road, Adugodi, |
Mumbai – 400 076 | Bangalore, India |
{ashish.krishna, rahul.ajmera}@hp.com | {sandesh.halarnkar, |
1 Currently at HP labs | prashant.pandit}@hp.com |
|
Abstract
Indic text input presents a unique challenge in the field of keyboard design because of the number of standalone characters, conjuncts, matras, and symbols. It poses a huge challenge to the HCI practitioners to accommodate the humongous array of Devnagari characters in a keyboard. Solutions for input in Devnagari scripts using a physical keyboard have been around for a while but none of them have emerged as a standard mechanism due to several usability related concerns. In this paper we have described the design of a new gesture based keyboard, which has a dual input mode 1. Gesturing 2. Tapping. The “gesture keyboard” concept is based on partial hand writing recognition as well as
1 Keywords
Devnagari text entry, Gesture Keyboard (GKB), Matras, Modifier, Syllable, IMEs
2 Introduction
Given the
This new keyboard introduces a paradigm shift in text inputting methods. We have developed a prototype for Devnagari, which takes best of both worlds; it takes cues from handwriting recognition (matras formation) and
The Gesture Keyboard is not presented as an alternative to the conventional English keyboard but has been proposed as a peripheral input device. The user would have an additional device (GKB) connected to his workstation along with the regular ASCII English keyboard and a mouse as shown in Figure below.