Gestyboard: A 10-finger-system and gesture based text input system for multi-touchscreens with no need for tactile feedback

This paper presents a new text-entry approach based on the 10-finger-system1 for multi-touch devices. A unique finger gesture-to-key mapping system is developed to overcome the lack of tactile feedback on touchscreens. The missing tactile feedback is in fact the main reason behind the low performance of virtual touchscreen keyboards with soft buttons. For this reason, we use unique gestures for all 10 fingers based on the German QWERTZ layout of the classical hardware keyboard. There are two classes of gestures: Taps and Slidings (Sliding gestures). Taps activate the central row letters ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘d’, ‘f’, and ‘j’, ‘k’, ‘l’, ‘; ’, while slidings are used for the remaining neighboring letters. The idea behind this is to perform the gestures without looking at the “virtual keyboard” and without tactile feedback. Since the gestures are based on the QWERTZ-layout, we expect the users to easier adapt to this new text-input system. By coupling the gestures to the highly efficient 10-finger-system the performance of the text entry can also be improved. We developed a first prototype, called Gestyboard, and conducted an evaluation with 41 pupils who were familiar with the 10-finger-system.     «

This paper presents a new text-entry approach based on the 10-finger-system1 for multi-touch devices. A unique finger gesture-to-key mapping system is developed to overcome the lack of tactile feedback on touchscreens. The missing tactile feedback is in fact the main reason behind the low performance of virtual touchscreen keyboards with soft buttons. For this reason, we use unique gestures for all 10 fingers based on the German QWERTZ layout of the classical hardware keyboard. There are two cla...     »