HP Gesture Keyboard User Manual

HP The input devices

Gesture Keyboard - User centered design of a unique input device
for Indic Scripts

♦

Ashish Krishna

, Rahul Ajmera

, Sandesh Halarnkar, Prashant Pandit

HP Laboratories India
HPL-2005-56
March 18, 2005*

devnagari text
entry, gesture
keyboard (GKB),
matras, modifier,
syllable, IMEs

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
touch-typing paradigms. Conceptually, it is a stylus sensitive keypad that
supports tapping for getting the base consonants and some symbols,
while it also recognizes handwritten matras as per handwriting
recognition methods. This paper also reports the findings of the user
study, which was carried out to find the optimum sizes of the keys and
layouts.

* Internal Accession Date Only

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HCI International 2005, 22-27 July 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Human Factors International, 4

Floor, Chemtex House, Hiranandani Gardens, Mumbai – 400 076, India

Approved for External Publication