Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Gesture Keyboard - User centered design of a unique input device for Indic Scripts (18 Mar 2005) 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. Article URL: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2005/HPL-2005-56.html Read 118 more articles from HP Labs sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Implementing a learning management system globally: An innovative change management approach     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy