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New Cell Phone Typing Solution
merlin_jim writes "Found this article on MSNBC about a new Cell Phone typing solution. It uses silicon sensors that can recognize the "shape" of each finger. The meaning of each key changes depending on which finger you use to press it; index finger for A, middle finger for B, etc. Unused finger/key combinations can be assigned to functions like ring volume." Watch out for those pop-up advertisements on your way into MSNBC. This is an idea I never really thought about for single handed typing input. A very cool idea.
I was typing, but I figured out I can't type any letter past the letter J.
Damn.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
...except that I use the thumb to press every key on the cellphone, holding it with the rest of the fingers.
If we have to use every finger, this means you suddenly need to use both hands just to use the phone - not a step forward.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
`F', not `B'? I'm pretty sure that's what I mean when I use _my_ middle finger.
:)
Is the backside of almost all cell phones is wasted space. Put a small keypad with a slip cover over it and give the user a stylus to type with. For that matter, put a one or two line LCD display there so you can see just the last word or words typed.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What if it is cold outside, and you are wearing gloves?
www.eFax.com are spammers
It's new, it's hype... it isn't fair to come with facts here... You have to be excited about that! Didn't you know?
Because the volume of sold phone isn't more rising, they have top bring something new, that everyone must have. BUY IT!
Or you're responsible it the whole marketing-bubble collapses!
PS: ouups... seems i forgot the tags
And if you are missing a few fingers, what is one to do? If you're missing your middle finger, you are already disadvantaged in communications when you're driving. Hopefully that doesn't spread to telephones.
I didn't read the article to avoid the popups, so kill my karma if it was answered in the article.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Watch out for those pop-up advertisements on your way into MSNBC.
That's what the middle fingers function will be for...
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
This looks interesting but expensive to implement (the article says $1 per sensor for 1 key and then you need to license & implement the technology). It seems to me that it would be easier to add 3-4 more buttons to an SMS phone that were pressed simultaneosly with the "letter" buttons. Since 2 hands are needed to operate the finger differentiating method, it won't matter if you use 2 hand for this "chord". In particular, those of us that thumb-type on a cell can just use both thumbs.
Just an idea....
Another use of the technology would be for video game controllers. Instead of placing multiple buttons on a controller (Sony's controller for the PlayStation 2 has eight buttons, not even counting the four direction buttons and the start and select buttons), a single button or a few buttons could be used for all the functions, with each finger denoting a particular action.
This would mean a fundamental change to gaming interaction. Instead of training our hands/fingers to move according to a certain button pattern on an input device, we would need to train our hands/fingers to react in different combinations.
Take a simple example: Imagine you are sitting in a completely closed off room (some isolated test environment) and you are told that you need to press buttons (provided in the room) to get food and water. So you learn to press this button over here to get food and that button over there to get water, and so on. Now, the test environment changes and removes the buttons from your little room. Now, you must learn to perform certain actions to get food and water like raising your right hand for food and raising your left hand for water.
Would this change of approach be benificial to gaming?
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
How does his system account for the different shapes of different peoples' hands? Do you have to calibrate it for your own fingers, or can anyone use it? For example, what if a woman, with more slender fingers used the phone? How would it be able to tell the difference between a fat index finger and a regular thumb?
It doesn't seem too promising to me, mainly because there simply isn't any algorithm which can account for the widly varying differences in human geometry, especially the hands.
I'd like to see it work before I would incorporate in my phone, and just not work for me. Take ten people with odd shaped fingers and see if it works.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
I can't see this being easier to use than the dictionary idea employed on Nokia phones (and probably others too). It gets you one push on each key and you can do it with your thumb. The newish Nokia 3330 even has multiple dictionaries so you can SMS in different languages. Admitadly it is a little clumsy when it doesn't know the word you're after, but once you've taught it your friends' names, you don't run into this too often.
and i don't care that it is fingers he are talking about, 10 individual fingers on a phone as tiny as any nokia is not only embarassing, but impractical.
a rudimentary stylus pane and something like graphitti would be infinately more practical.
i for one would stear clear of any appliance that wanted me to learn some obscure dvorkian-esque ten fingered gymnastics to enter in "John Walsh - Home".
I sympathize with people that want to see a better interface implimented so they can text message, but this is hokie, regaurdless of the of the two patents and the $50,000 VC and the writeup in MSNBC...
in the words of Steve Martin, "That was shit one, this is shit two..."
I have just tried this approach for the last ten minutes, and I must confess, this one is not too easy. I wonder if, if this tech ever reached our mobiles, we would be faced with the same conversion as say for example, a QWERTY to DVORAK keyboard change.
People don't tend to change from something that they've grown accustomed to - the phones' interface hasn't really changed in years.
Nevertheless, I'd be excited to see what this brings.
You are right, SMS are 160 chars long and we use it _a lot_, but I just tried using different fingers in my phone keyboard, I don't like it at all, it is not comfortable!
I think that the predictive text input used in many phones is great, you can type really fast, I doubt that a much faster rate can be achieved with the new method.
Still, I type much faster on my computer; something that gets me to that speed would be great, maybe voice recognition!, but this one is not that good.
My fingers are a bit too big to hit the buttons, so I usually end up pressing the buttons with my fingernails. I seriously doubt that I'm going to hit the buttons in the same spot so that it generates a similar pattern each time.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I'm developing an intelligent access control system for a client, running on a win32/linux combination system.
We have a biometrics component to do fingerprint recognition (amoungst other things), and one application we have is for general building access control.
But what is relevant to this article, is that we have different fingers (which are assigned to people, who in turn have security attributes) applied to different tasks... such as a index finger for normal opreration, pinkie for fire alarm, and middle finger for silent alarm (hostage situations)
I don't think we are the only people who have thought of this though...
We have a label maker at work, and since it's a narrow "box" basically, there are several rows of letters and numbers.
Sounds easy to type in your message in the little LCD thing, right?
Wrong. No matter how many times I use it, my typing speed drops dramatically, since I spend most of my time looking for the right letter to hit. Yet, on my Qualcomm, I can punch in a name much easier.
Don't most people hold the phone with fingers and type with thumbs? Everyone I know does, same for two ways and small PDA keyboards.
A cute idea, but I have a feeling that it will not be well recieved.
Surprising of course since Taco has of course thought of all the other great ideas ever imagined.
It's what I use on my Nokia 6210 and it's great, user dictionary entries and multiple languages mean even my French is spelt correctly ;o)
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
How about just putting one button on cell phones and have everybody learn morse code. :)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
If you're dialling(? keying?) a number instead of a letter, the middle finger should produce a 4 as shown
here.
For UK users, please dial 6, for metal freaks, please dial 18.
when I'm trying to dial a number while driving.
How often do you have to enter a lot of text with only one hand free?
Yes. predictive text is ducking excellent. I used to have one of those piece of shiv phones that didn't have it, but my new 6210 is the dog's collo?.
In the spoon, there is no Soviet Russia!
Moreover, different people have different finger shapes - I have seen people with a larger index finger than the middle finger or of irregular shapes due to accidents. Will they be incapable of using these phones? Discriminating people due to their finger shapes is also very innovative!
Extending this technology to other input methods in Asia (Chinese and Japanese) will be awkward to say the least.
¦ ©® ±
Keypress detected...
analyzing...
Its not the pointer...
Its not the index finger...
Its not the ring finger...
Its not the pinky...
Its not the thumb...
OH MY GOD!
ILLEGAL USE OF PHONE DETECTED!!!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Anyway, cyclic typing is the best possible way to do blind typing (for example, while driving, in order to keep your eyes on the road) and DictAssisted typing is usually the fastest way to type (except when you use a lot of words not in the dictionnary).
You could have one multifunction button on your phone, similar to the way most "send" buttons work presently. This one big button could have one of these special sensors and could be used in an endless variety of ways. Thumb for voice dial, index for phone book, middle for missed calls, ring for.... plus every menu, instead of having options 1-5, could have options based on your fingers. After a little getting used to, people would love this technology, I predict. It will be sort of like the function buttons on Scientific Calculators.
~ now you know
As they say in Hawaii
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E_NOSIG
This is an idea I never really thought about for single handed typing input. wrote Commander Taco
So, how fast were you able to type "what are you wearing?" in the chat room?
I just tried it on my phone (simulated of course) and it seems like it'd be a LARGE step backwards from the current T9/etc that's on the market. I've used T9 and it works great, and do most of the typing by holding the phone with my hand and using my thumb on that hand only. I can get decent amounts done that way. (I have a Sony J5 BTW)... This way you're pretty much required to use 2 hands, which makes it pretty inconvenient for places where you only have one hand available.
And actually I doubt if it's any faster. You need to move your entire hand around and hit those small small keys with different fingers which is pretty awkward to do. I can't see this being much faster than T9, or what will soon be (give it a year or so) voice dictated anyways.
And besides, how much text do you ACTUALLY send on your cellphone? I use the email feature to CHECK email and send a 5 word reply. I use SMS to RECEIVE traffic/weather/etc updates and the occasional note by my friends. But if I need to talk with one of them, I call them! I have the phone right there and talking is BY FAR FAR FAR more efficient than any typing method would be.
If God gave us curiosity
This won't catch on, and it would not work one-handed. You would have to place it on a surface of some kind to be able to press the keys with your fingers (I don't know about you guys, but when I'm typing on a cell phone, I use my THUMB), or be held with the other hand.
It also does not work with hunting-and-pecking, so, like just about every ass-headed typing scheme that has come along and failed to even make a DENT in qwerty (except maybe Dvorak, and some other keyboard layouts), it doesn't really have a learning CURVE so much as a BRICK FUCKING WALL you would have to vertically climb before the thing becomes even remotely useful.
Which letters would you assign to which fingers?
I'm thinking: A, C, D, I, M, O, and S should all be in the same group.
I'd be able to type "DMCA", "MS", "CIA", "SSSCA", or "Osama" with just my middle finger!
I don't know why nobody posted this before (or why it didn't get modded up), but on my Nokia 8260, and on my old Samsung SCH8580 there is a built-in dictionary.
The way it works is quite simple, if you try to type the word "message" all you have to do is press 6377243, and it automatically guesses the match, in this case the word "message". If there are more than one match, all it takes is pressing a button multiple times, to scroll through the list of matches. It has English, French and I believe Spanish (my phone is my coat pocket, and I don't feel like getting it).
I've been using my Nokia for quite a while with this system, and honestly I don't need anyting else. It's almost perfect, and the only difficulty is when you want to insert names, or numbers, but that only requires a couple of extra key presses.
So my question is why bother with weird finger press combinations, finger-sensing buttons when the best solution is already out there?!? I guess this is one way somebody is trying to make extra money on royalties, but I don't know...
What about those that have lost a finger due to an accident?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
No, it isn't either, for the same geometry problem.
The problem for cellphone, is that the way you use it, (mostly with your thumb) is with a fixed position of the hand.
For a gamepad, this is pretty much the same, and in fact, it's even worse, because you have higher speed concerns.
To play most action games, you position your fingers above the buttons you will be using and combine, click and click again as fast as possible.
You would use a considerable amount of time to try clicking the same button with different fingers, it's much better to have as many buttons as possible comfortably spread around the device so that you have them all ready to click/trigger/press..
The invention is interesting, but pretty useless in fact, they could have as well invented a camera that could sense your head orientation so that you could do a few things just by moving your head.
It would be interesting but useless, it's not useful just because it is possible or even cool.
The few examples they propose in the article and for what patents were filled are all equaly useless (and even dangerous).
But I could see an application that maybe they forgot to patent:
someone could make a teaching keyboard to train people for typing, or music... where a program could teach the student how to position his fingers and monitor if the words are entered correctly, or if a melody is played "the right way", things like that...
The problem is human factors -- getting people used to a new idea. People are used to the 1 button - 1 function idea. Plus you have the training issue: there are not a lot of people who are capable of teaching themselves touch-typing; there are probably fewer who could learn how to chord without an instructor.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Another point I don't believe has been mentioned was what if you want to perform action A and B at the same time but they require the same finger to be on different buttons, or one button to be pressed by two fingers. This situation occurs almost every second of every FPS game, and although some of these conflicts exist with present devices, they would pale in comparison with those introduced by this technology.
The driving factor behind this technology is maximum use out of limited buttons, by sacrificing movement complexity (and therefore increasing time required) and simultanious actions. Gamers don't need a small limit on the number of buttons they use, and they definitely need minimum time and simultanious actions. For these reasons, I believe this technology is exactly the opposite of what you'd want in a game controller.
From the women I've spoken with,
the tongue is much more effective
when used for writting cursive..
Sure, it takes a bit longer,
but makes the message more personal,
and that is greatly appreciated.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
This is an idea I never really thought about for single handed typing input. A very cool idea.
I'm sure that, being geeks, we can certainly appreciate the, umm, usability aspects of single-handed input. (Or single-handed output, depending how you look at the situation.)
(Sorry.)