Carnegie Mellon Offers Wee QWERTY Texting Tech For Impossibly Tiny Devices 100
coondoggie writes "If smartwatches and other ultra-small devices are to become the text generators of the future, their diminutive keyboards are going to have to be way more useful for, um, big fingered typists. Carnegie Mellon researchers may have the answer to that problem. Called ZoomBoard, the text entry technique is based on the iconic QWERTY keyboard layout."
The zoom board paper (PDF) has details. Entering a letter becomes a multi-step process; first you mash the general area of the keyboard containing the letter you want, and eventually it becomes large enough to hit. Test subjects managed to hit 9.3wpm after practice, versus 4.5 wpm for people trying to peck on a teeny-tiny virtual keyboard. They were inspired at least in part by the venerable Dasher input method.
Not as good as Morse (Score:5, Insightful)
People should just learn Morse code, only one button. It's the original text message tech.
And good Morse code operators go vastly faster than a mere 9.3 world per minute.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Google already did this. Gmail Tap [google.com]
Cool! Google "upgrades" to Morse Code!
Was that an April 1 post?
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Speaking to a device is great an all, except that it's entirely impractical in many of the places where typing currently takes place. In an office environment, we'd all be drowning in a cacophony of noise that would shatter our concentration if we had to type up every TPS report verbally. And we already know from cellphones and Bluetooth headsets that people find it hard to ignore others (not to mention annoying) when only one side of the conversation can be heard. Plus, there's also the fact that privacy g
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Dragging along a BT keyboard of course becomes more bulky and a bigger PITA than just carrying a little laptop so we are right back where we started.
The problem with a notebook is that the keyboard is permanently attached, and none of them have a back facing camera.
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Why does a notebook need a back-facing camera?
So you can take pictures of the blackboard, or the presentation. It's a little hard to get zoomed in on the right spot with a front facing notebook camera.
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The problem with a notebook is that the keyboard is permanently attached, and none of them have a back facing camera.
You can get a transformer, or you can get one of the many notebooks with a flip-over camera. I like the Lifebook T900, which has many other features we expect to see in modern computers, but it is a bit massive by modern standards.
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If only there were some way to connect a keyboard to a device that does not have one.
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It's also an early example of data compression, with more common letters generally having shorter forms than uncommon ones.
I tried posting this IN morse, but Slashdot thought it was lame. I think they're right!
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The "modern" input equivalent is chording keyboards --- instead of a "single bit per tap," you use combinations of several fingers to produce even higher data rates. Steep learning curve, indeed, but people who learn to use them can type blazingly fast on a rather small input device.
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9.3 words a minute is absolutely abysmal. Stephen Hawking does better than that. Though granted he is a genius unlike the people who would buy a keyboard smaller than a penny.
Seriously? (Score:2)
I've never really sat down and assessed how slowly I type on a phone, but 9.3 wpm is more than a factor of 10 from my keyboard typing speed. Why have we decided that stupid tiny keyboards are a good idea?
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Why have we decided that stupid tiny keyboards are a good idea?
You don't have a keyboard with you if you are on a train or bus. This is the replacement for a smart phone, not your desktop PC. Still, 4 or even 9 wpm (words per minute) seems a little slow? I've seen kids text on the old phones (before touch screens) faster than that.
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You do if you're carrying a netbook. They have keyboards you can get a decent typing speed on.
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You do if you're carrying a netbook
Except they stopped making netbooks [slashdot.org] because tablets are better than netbooks for the majority of people.
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No-one's told Asus [amazon.co.uk] or Acer [amazon.co.uk] then?
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Or carry a smartphone with a full 5 row keyboard, with swype I can probably do 10-20 wpm with corrections, with the hardware keyboard probably 30-40. I'm really quite perplexed by the fact that hardware keyboards aren't more popular considering that kids spend most of their time on the phone texting/IMing.
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True, but the whole quest is to make a device smaller. You cannot carry a netbook in a pocket (or you actually can, but some people have really small pockets!). I also carry a backpack with a small laptop... a small laptop has many advantages over smart phones or even tinier devices (multiple usb ports, a larger screen, and I can have my favorite distro on it) but some other people think there's a market for tiny devices. Let them. It's nice to see they are finding a solution to one of the more fundamental
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Yet they're still orders of magnitude easier to use... (because you can't accidentally hit several keys around the one you were trying to hit. You either press the right key, or nothing.)
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It is quite slow, I remember back before I learned to touch type, that I could hunt and peck at around 35wpm, and even somebody of low skill ought to be able to do at least 15wpm with some practice. Anybody doing less than that hasn't had much practice and is having to hunt over the entire keyboard without any clue as to roughly where the keys are that they're needed.
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Why have we decided that stupid tiny keyboards are a good idea?
Because not everybody has the room to carry around a Bluetooth keyboard, nor the chance to sit down and use them. If you want to type something while standing in the checkout line, where will you put a full-size keyboard?
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It really begs the question of what could be so important to type that it needs to be done while standing in a checkout line.
(On another topic: your sig is feeding the trolls.)
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Your wife knows you're at the grocery store, sends you a text to remind you of buying milk and you need to text her back with "1 or 2%?".
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IMO while people having long (and sometimes VERY personal) conversations in the grocery line is annoying, a call that's basically (from the shopper's side) "Hi, honey, 1% or 2% milk? Okay, see you soon. Bye." is fine and probably takes less time than typing out the text and the other party doing the same. [The % character is likely going to require switching between keyboards letter->symbols and back again.]
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It really begs the question of what could be so important to type that it needs to be done while standing in a checkout line.
The grocery list?
(On another topic: your sig is feeding the trolls.)
On another topic: your post is feeding the Grammar Nazis. It raises the question. Begging the question [wikipedia.org] means something completely different, and certainly not what you intended.
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Grow up, begging the question is the same thing as raising the question, it means that something somebody has said begs further questions to be asked. Begging the question is something completely different and it's contextually clear which one the GP was intending.
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I should have been more specific. The second begging the question is the logical fallacy. The first is just the phrase that means raises the question.
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The first is wrong.
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The second is wrong. "Begging the question" as a logical fallacy is a mistranslation of a Latin term. (Your signature would leave one to believe that you would be less favorably inclined towards the group basing their phrases on mistranslations of Latin.) The term is better translated as "Demanding the first principle" and is better understood today as "Circular Reasoning."
Just because people have been doing it wrong for hundreds of years does not mean that we have to purpetuate that wrong. Language evolve
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No, it's not. Apart from hardcore pedants, everybody else accepts it as a legitimate meaning for the phrase. Bottom line is that things like this mean what they do by consensus, not because people refuse to recognize newer definitions.
And I suppose you don't accept that "literally all the time" does not necessarily mean constantly.
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It really begs the question of what could be so important to type that it needs to be done while standing in a checkout line.
It's not necessarily the ability to type in a checkout line. It's the ability to read something to pass the time in a checkout line, and I've found that inconvenient with a laptop. The advantage of a device with no permanently attached physical keyboard is that you can use it without the keyboard for reading when you're sure that you won't be doing any heavy-duty typing. It's true of a tablet, true of a phone, and probably true of the smart watch that the article appears to imply.
Dialing Wand (Score:1)
Old news or is it just me. (Score:1)
Slashdot, you are now the one and only, lonely, single entry on the "watching a recast of yesterdays news unfold" category of bookmarks.
So to sumarise (Score:2)
Love seeing all the old fogies retire and a bunch of hipster faggots replace them. We can see technology moving backwards as expected.
The fucking iPhone soft keyboard is the shittiest piece of shit ever. The fact they don't scroll the text input dialog until you stop typing was added to increase the annoyance and to ensure backwards movement in usability.
The summary on this story sums it all up. Sounds like a total fucking cluster fuck just to put some novelty e-waste shovel-ware garbage on the market.
You go to such great fucking lengths to improve the input capabilities, and it's still shit. Maybe you should go back to the fucking drawing board. Better yet, through the fucker out because a "smart watch" is a stupid idea as long as it's taking input from a fucking hacked up keyboard.
NO FUCKING WAY! Captcha: teletype
So to sumarise: Someone improved something that you don't want and don't use and that didn't impress you.
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Also, research & trying new things to see if they work is not necessary. Everything was done in the 60s.
GP probably looking for a job in NSF administration.
voice control (Score:2)
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Because you might not want everyone in the room to hear the message you're sending.
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Why not get rid of the keyboard altogether and have voice control?
Consider the following searches:
"best hemorrhoid cream"
"pubic lice shampoo"
"best lubricant for anal"
"does insurance cover generic viagra"
"vaginal odor treatment"
When you're at the pharmacy (or on the subway on the way there), would you prefer to enter those searches via keyboard or voice input?
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Most people wouldn't do that in public regardless of the input. Shoulder surfers et al.
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Lack of privacy is a big one, as others have pointed out.
It gets hard to concentrate if everyone in the office is talking at once.
In public spaces, we already know that people get annoyed when they can only hear what sounds like one side of a conversation (see: cellphones) since it breaks from the natural back-and-forth that our brains expect and can easily ignore. How much more annoying to just have someone prattling on constantly?
The keyboard does a number of things that speaking is ill-suited to handle.
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Or better yet, why not extend a laser keyboard onto your arm? Much larger keyboard, same size package on your wrist.
Still slower form of text entry than pretty much anything else, because you're restricted to one hand, but c'est la vie.
I think many people on Slashdot know perfectly well how quickly one can type with just one hand.
For example, I was just eating my lunch with one hand and typing with the other and while it was slower than typing with two, it wasn't that slow. It was likely faster than the 9.something WPM cited in the summary.
Timex/Sinclair (Score:2)
Smartwatches? Keyboards? Time to resurrect the Timex/Sinclair brand!
brain mapping dystonia (Score:3)
This is guaranteed to screw up people's ability to accurately place their fingers.
Same reason I turn off AutoCorrect -- because when the user can just wave and poke at the approximate area of the keyboard -- and get the right letter supplied -- the brain fuzzes over its map of the keyboard and the finger placement becomes imprecise. Or rather exactly precise enough to get the desired result -- which is pretty damn sloppy when the computer's taking care of the final accuracy.
'oogle brain mapping dystonia -- lots of academic work on this, it's a serious problem.
Sorry, CMU, this is going to cripple people if you implement it.
Not right away, it'll take some time before the damage is apparent.
PS, so let the damn computer learn to read script (Score:3)
If the computer's good enough to get the right letter out of a vague approximation of position on a mini keyboard, it ought to be able to read my handwriting.
Want to do input on a tiny little area or just by waving your hands in the air?
Penmanship. Just make the computer able to read handwriting.
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I turned off autocorrect on my Android phone because it constantly filled in the wrong word. This as opposed to Word, which rarely did.
Maybe it was the higher error rate, or maybe it was too dumb not to correct proper nouns, who knows? But off it went. And his problem irritated me to near death within a few sentences, it was so pervasive.
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Is that an "autocorrect what you typed" feature, or an "autocomplete before you type anything more" feature?
Yay technology! (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't it amazing how great the advancement of technology is for device usability! Now people can type at an amazing *9.3* words per minute! It's hard to imagine how we ever got by back in the old days, when a casual typist could only achieve 30-60 WPM --- uphill through the snow both ways barefoot. Progress!
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It's hard to imagine how we ever got by back in the old days, when a casual typist could only achieve 30-60 WPM --- uphill through the snow both ways barefoot. Progress!
In the old days, the only keyboard on your watch was for a calculator and maybe address book. It is pretty amazing how great the advancement of technology is for device usability - not having to hit a shitty tiny membrane key three or four times to get a letter is a significant advance in watch technology.
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Old and broken:
Darn, I'd like to type this message up, but my computer terminal is all the way over in Sector W. It'll take me 8 minutes of walking, just for 2 minutes to type and send the message.
New hotness:
I can send a message right from where I am, on my watch! All I have to do is fiddle with my wrist for 12 minutes, and voila, instant gratification!
All the advances in wristwatch IO are fixing problems created by insisting on doing stupid shit on a wristwatch that a wristwatch isn't any good for. Looking forward to future technological advances, like:
Shaving by burning my hair off with a hot clothes iron used to be incredibly painful... but with advances in rapid temperature control, my new techno-iron can singe off my hair with 78% less third-degree-burn scars, while reading me live updates from my twitfeed!
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All the advances in wristwatch IO are fixing problems created by insisting on doing stupid shit on a wristwatch that a wristwatch isn't any good for.
One day we'll all have natural voice DWIM interfaces and then this problem will be moot. Until then, some people will be trying to solve the problem of letting people make their devices do the things they want to do. It would be nice if we all had access to a big screen and all the input devices we could ever want no matter where we went, but until we can pull them out of a pocket dimension we're still going to want to use small devices to do jobs that could better be done with a large device if only we had
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Someday, when new snazzy technology catches up to the point of actually improving over older systems, I'll sign up too. For a tiny fraction of the population, perhaps the bleeding-edge whizzies already do offer something useful (...at least points on the conspicuous consumption fashion scoreboard). However, I see a lot of people leaping two steps back to grab that one step forward promised by the latest-and-greatest micro-doodad.
Hey, I'm gonna burn six hours of my wages per month on a fancy smartphone contract, so I can twit my facebook angrybirds in the grocery line! Timesaver! And now I've got way better things to do while driving than watch the boring road!
This might be better than nothing... (Score:3)
but I'm sure hopeful there are better input methods than this!
This is the problem (Score:3)
On screen keyboards suck, period.
Having to tap several times to get to the key you want is a nuisance. This will be the one thing that ruins any new smart watch device, assuming you must type text on the screen using a keyboard to interact with it.
At some point you have to accept that just because it has a screen and processor in it along with wireless communications does not mean it has to become a social platform or even one that requires text input.
If app designers for new smartwatch devices are thinking about solutions for how to solve on-screen typing they have already failed. There is a reason why phones are moving to larger and larger screens because people find text input on smaller screens a horrendous experience. A small 2" watch screen is not going to have any adequate method for text input, so don't bother with the functionality.
I don't see why we need smart watches, but we need them even less as a social/texting platform.
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Onscreen keyboards would be OK if they actually did less.
Give me arrow keys right there, so I can scroll the cursor to where I want instead of trying to press a seven hundred square foot fintertip between two hugging ants.
Stop "helping" me with backspace. I will decide when to release, not you. I don't want you erasing the entire 500 word essay because I held it down for 5s. Especially without an undo. Mac solved this problem 30 fucking years ago.
"It seems'" says Morpheus, "that those idiot programmer
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A thousand times this.
Just write on the screen (Score:4, Insightful)
The old Palm watch came with a tiny stylus that let you write on the touch screen using their Graffiti system. A normal palm had a separate part of the screen for writing. The watch has some why of switch the screen from tapping mode to writing mode.
handwriting recognition (Score:2)
It's early texting all over again... (Score:1)
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Why have a smartwatch at all when we already have very capable smartphones - not much bigger than a deck of playing cards - that easily fit in a pocket?
Why qwerty? (Score:3)
Using the input method of a bulky device (whose letters were ordered that way to not let you write too fast to avoid jamming of mechanical parts) with fixed letter positions for very high tech, digital small devices, with no mechanical parts that could jam could not be the best approach.
Maybe entry could be arranged like in compressing algorithms, having the most common letters and words right at your reach (few bits/touches) and you could navigate to more uncommon ones that fits in your input. Or handwritting recognition, but with extended "alphabet" (where you can have different gestures for i.e. common words). Or hardware keyboards with soft keys.
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Using the input method of a bulky device (whose letters were ordered that way to not let you write too fast to avoid jamming of mechanical parts) with fixed letter positions for very high tech, digital small devices, with no mechanical parts that could jam could not be the best approach.
Maybe entry could be arranged like in compressing algorithms, having the most common letters and words right at your reach (few bits/touches) and you could navigate to more uncommon ones that fits in your input. Or handwritting recognition, but with extended "alphabet" (where you can have different gestures for i.e. common words). Or hardware keyboards with soft keys.
Yes please for the love of god can we kill QWERTY on small-form keyboards? Putting three vowels right next to each other is a major annoyance. bug/big/bog, suck/sick/sock, un/in/on, if/of ..... so many common words that can end up wrong by just a couple millimeters, in such a way that autocorrect will never catch them.
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Make fingers smaller. (Score:1)
Marvellous! (Score:1)
Bluetooth? (Score:2)
And to anyone who says "use speech recognition"? It doesn't work for me. I get atrocious (70%+/-) accuracy with it due to my gravelly voice.