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8pen Reinvents the Keyboard For Mobile Devices
An anonymous reader submitted linkage to a company called 8pen that has a new take on one-handed input. I've attached the video if you click the link below, but it's a strange idea using outward spreading swipes that somewhat mimics handwriting. It ships for Android tomorrow, but even if you don't want to try it out, it's an interesting idea for anyone who is tired of finger tapping on a tiny screen.
see the big video link, just below... that one.. also the link in the summary has a giant "PLAY VIDEO!" button
My parent's generation is still trying to figure out 3-3-3 for F, despite having an alpha-numeric keypad since the days of rotary phones. How are they supposed to learn this?
All these different types of keyboards for the android devices are making my head spin. Next it will be brain waves to text! I'll stick with SwipeIT, thank you very much....
You know, you could add a pen to the device, so you don't have to deal with, say, something that makes it hard to swipe your finger across the screen and reduce the grease in the screen.
Then, after that, you could make the movements more like handwritting, since people are used to that.
Then, maybe, to help people write things faster, put split areas for letters and numbers.
You know, I think I saw that somewhere else before....
Reminds me a bit of Swype though watching the video, it seems like it would be slower than Swype.
I'll probably try it out though. My anticipation is that I would need to learn the positions of all the letters to know how many sectors to cover for each. Counting them on the fly would really slow it down. And then there would be those words I'd hate because they involved lots of swirls. Like how we hated people with 9s in their phone numbers during the days of rotary phones.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
seems pretty neat but so did the rest at the time
T9 (how many years development? and still everyone turns it off)
Swype
Gestures
Dasher
etc etc
and still blackberries et al still have a qwerty input method
somebody needs to update the famous slashdot spam template "your post advocates..." but for input methods
Those of us who have been on the Internet since puberty have already mastered the art of one-handed input with a standard keyboard and mouse. With the proper motivation we can easily adapt this skill to a regular on-screen keyboard.
Really? And it ships for android tomorrow? Fascinating. Almost a coincidence.
I hope he wasn't too anonymous, and that Slashdot is able to cash the check he sent along with his submission...
Calm down, I'm sure it was just a random Slashdotter submitting an innocent link.
The process assumes that a keyboard is less handy than a touch-rotate-touch-release. In short, this is doomed to fail because I must memorize things. It's probably easier for us to all learn Morse, and just have a deet da dee deet festival.
Are those letter positions optimal? The scheme feels nice, but I'm not sure if the letter positions are as good as they could be.
Safari doesn't display anything. I see the problem. Same problem as their website.
Note: The tag is deprecated. There's articles as far back as 2006 saying to stop using the embed tag.
can't we just stick devices in our heads to read our thoughts directly?
“Intuitive”? Looks like a nightmare to learn.
Is it a big coincidence, or is there someone at 8pen who's a Neo-Geo fan?
I stick with my standard keyboard :))
I predict a level of success similar to that achieved by previous attempts to replace the qwerty scheme, even ones that were arguably better. At best, it will gain a small, rabid following, that will eventually end up putting off additional converts. Of course, it's far more likely it will simply slide into obscurity.
Why not Fitaly?
Both Safari and Firefox seem to work just fine under OSX.
The embedded link is a YouTube video. Maybe there is something blocking the embedded code from running, or blocking YouTube where you are?
The link to see the video on YouTube's site is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3OuCR0EpGo&feature=player_embedded
One-handed input without an appropriate name? I'm sticking with my Twiddler.
Instead of alphabetical order, prioritize the most commonly used characters. Right now, A, E, I, M, Q, U Y and . have the fastest, one-swipe spots. Some of those make sense (e is very common, for instance) but q? Meanwhile, S and T, both popular letters, are in poorly-optimized locations.
C'mon, people. You can do better than this.
The fact that it's the same broken, deprecated "embed tag" for the video in both the summary and the company website is also a mere coincidence.
Using almost letter like gestures to type in text.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
You either don't have Flash, or your adblocker is fucking it up.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
This seems like a bit of an awkward kludge - capacitive touchscreens are evidently not terribly well suited to such precise inputs.
It's been about 10 years since I've regularly used a Palm Pilot. Handwriting recognition on those devices Worked. I could get quite consistent input, at roughly the same speed as I could writing by hand.
To this day, my written "T" still looks like a "7" on occasion. It felt quite natural and, as far as I know, no handwriting mechanism has come close to rivaling it for effectiveness/consistency.
Do the WebOS devices still have this capability?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I browse with Flash disabled. When someone says "there's a link to the video", it should be a link to the video, not the video itself.
It also uses the old, deprecated embed tag, which embeds a (probably) H.264 video inside a Flash player when Safari is capable of playing the video file by itself.
Video which is hosted on YouTube on top of it all. It would have been easier to link directly to YouTube.
dont know what to tell you man... other than 'you arent missing much'.
That's why so many old phone numbers are of the form word-numbers, like PEnnsylvania-65000. It just made them easier to remember, a word and five digits as opposed to 7 digits. They were just names, backfit to match the digits, so PEnnsylvania and ODeriferous were the same exchange. They were called exchanges, but I don't know if the public used that word in the same way that telephone engineers used it.
Infuriate left and right
Instead of hitting the right spot, you have to "draw" something around those sectors. But drawing letters requires a not so different effort (if you want, old palm simplification of letters instead of "correct" ones) and this seem to have a steep learning curve. Still prefer my old N900 keyboard, if you can write complex shell commands and regular expressions with it, it must be good.
This seems like a really complex solution to a simple problem. It seems to me the premise for this is it's hard to type on a touch screen with your fingers. If only we could decrease the area of contact with the phone. Maybe a short, thin, plastic rod you could use to tap the screen...
For my Android! Yipee!
just watched the video. even if i memorized every gesture (quite a feat mind you) how could making a gesture be faster than one single press, which is what i have today?
the only possibly advantage is success rate. for an on screen keyboard my success rate varies between 80-60%. depending on how tired i am and how much attention i'm paying. could this do better? it seems possible since you only need to move your finger from the center to 2 of the four large sections ... that are much larger than a key on an on screen keyboard. that's not taking into account simply making the incorrect gesture however. visually, it's quick to see the "G" on a keyboard than it is to look at this contraption and find the quadrant containing the "G" then seeing that it's the Nth character from the center.
the other thing is that smooth continuous gestures depend on external factors like the amount of gunk on my screen, my fingers, and the humidity of my hand. a simple tap always works.
anyway, kudos to them for the invention. seems like it should have been more of an r&d project than a product.
There's too much hassle in learning the system and becoming proficient in it. I use Swype which is phenomenal - it's fast and hardly requires any learning if you know the qwerty keyboard.
I love her accent and want to shag her. Where is she from??
Looks a lot like Quikwriting that I had installed on my palm 10 years ago.
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/demos/quikwriting2_1-rel-notes.html
What porn site are you playing with?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
How much distance I would be traveling with my finger to write a message comparing to a virtual keyboard?, and on top of that I have to be dragging my finger through the screen as opposed to a virtual keyboard.
I hate handwriting. Am curious to see if this gets faster past a learning curve. I find the two finger iPhone method to be pretty effective. I use my index finger as my left hand and my middle finger as my right hand and position them on the keyboard appropriately. I find I can usually fly right along.
The issue with trying to leave the keyboard is the people that are totally used to it and can type fast are comfortable with seeking out the actual letters when laid out keyboard style. Change those locations and it becomes counter intuitive.
-Xen
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/demos/quikwriting.html
Seems to be a better implementation of the same thing as the targets get bigger as you use them!
This was even discussed on Slashdot in 1999 :
http://slashdot.org/hardware/99/04/29/1734246.shtml
What....??? ....I .... Wait.... Are you saying that a Slashdot news story covered.... an innovative piece of software that isn't free??? Well I never! This will not stand! Slashdot, I hereby tender my resignation, effective immediately!
Oh please, everyone who suggests using a stylus...
Have you ever used a decent capacitive screen (e.g. Samsung Galaxy, or any iDevice)?
They are very precise and very responsive. Devices that require a pen also require you to pick up that pen first. I used a PalmOS device when these were still popular, and typing did work - but pulling out the pen was a serious hassle, and the tiny pens felt awkward.
The only precision problem modern capacitive screens have is the curvature of the human finger, and the user's inability to properly see (or even estimate!) where his finger touches the glass. That's something I believe can be learned/trained, though, so it's important kids learn to use touch screens much like they learn to use a pencil.
I think Palm's simplified alphabet would work awesomely on capacitive touch screens. It's just that patents block most of the innovation in this field (and 8pen is also patent pending... he great...)
My god this will be a miserable failure. You know nothing about humans if you think they are going to learn some crazy new writing that doesn't resemble anything they've done before, when they can just be stupid and type on an onscreen keyboard. This ain't happening, just like Dvorak even though it's superior.
The speech recognition on my G2 is fannn-tastic. faster than i can peck out with the hardware keyboard. People look at you funny(er) at first, and it won't work well in a noisy environment, but definitely my preferred method of entry when possible.
are you disputing that fact? I have also noticed this trend.
It uses the same kind of gestures but with a different layout.
http://www.google.nl/search?hl=&q=quikwriting
Reminds me more of Quikwriting, actually... ...yup, 11 years old. Ken Perlin dabbled with input methods for a while there...
http://slashdot.org/hardware/99/04/29/1734246.shtml
http://cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/
Based on the video this is the same idea as QuickWriting that I played around with on my PalmPilot a number of years ago. See: http://mrl.nyu.edu/projects/quikwriting/ The Quikwriting site says it has a patent on the method. So are we in for another litigation in the handheld area? Or is this the same technology under a different name?
So here is yet another interface that I have to learn in order to be able to make a device do what I want it to do. When are we going to get to a point where the devices learn how I want to interact with them?
This reminds me of the input method used on the Palm: Graffiti. With Graffiti, you had to learn how the Palm expected you to write the letters. Most was just uppercase versions of the letters, but some were quite different. It took a while to learn.
It's easy enough to learn, but there was a case reported of someone saying that handwriting of those people using Graffiti was suffering. Sometimes they'd write a Graffiti version of the letter they were writing, or somewhere between the letter and the graffiti version. Flow of handwriting was an issue, and stunted writing doesn't look clear.
I'm curious whether this method would cause a similar issue. It may not, as you are not writing with strokes that approximate the letters themselves, but will be interesting in the long run to see the effect.
If I had 2.2 on my phone, I'd download this when it's available to try it out. Unfortunately, I have an X10, and am still waiting for the 2.1 upgrade to be make available to me... :(
T.
I know you'll find this surprising, but you can't resign from the Constantly Surprised department.
503 Slashdotted
Well, I put it in the "No shit, sherlock"-sort of insightful.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
This reminds me of the input method used on the Palm: Graffiti. With Graffiti, you had to learn how the Palm expected you to write the letters. Most was just uppercase versions of the letters, but some were quite different. It took a while to learn.
It's easy enough to learn, but there was a case reported of someone saying that handwriting of those people using Graffiti was suffering. Sometimes they'd write a Graffiti version of the letter they were writing, or somewhere between the letter and the graffiti version. Flow of handwriting was an issue, and stunted writing doesn't look clear.
I'm curious whether this method would cause a similar issue. It may not, as you are not writing with strokes that approximate the letters themselves, but will be interesting in the long run to see the effect.
If I had 2.2 on my phone, I'd download this when it's available to try it out. Unfortunately, I have an X10, and am still waiting for the 2.1 upgrade to be make available to me... :(
T. (repost - wasn't logged in last time)
Nor can you resign from the Can't Understand Sarcasm department.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
If someone comes up with a device that uses something like this - but with the input at the back of the device - I'm sold. Just make some dints and bumps so that my finger knows where it is.
How is video like this made ? Any specific tools ?
Absolutely... an efficient one-handed input system. That'll be absolutely perfect for surfing porn^H^H^H^H^H^H reading Wikipedia articles...
This seems very similar to a decade old input method called Quikwriting.
Why not just use Graffiti. I think it would be much easier to learn and provides visual feedback. It's also now available for Android platforms.
Although very cool at the time, the original Apple Newton handwriting recognition recognition was somewhat weak and suffered from too much emphasis on predictive dictionary lookup. So much so that even a perfectly formed "falafel" always resulted in "father" until falafel was added to the dictionary. The solution was Graffiti. Later Newtons had much better handwriting recognition and Graffiti was no longer needed, but the Palm Pilot, a Newton competitor, adopted Graffiti and was, thus able to run on much cheaper hardware and take over the PDA market. After many years, legal wrangling put the ownership of Graffiti in the hands of Access, which has made it available for Android.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
I think SlydeBoard (http://whawk640.robotdrone.com/Android/index.php) has less of a learning curve than this! Still, it looks interesting, I'll try it!
Try SlydeBoard while you're at it. Touch type all keys. Use both thumbs on your cel-phone like you use both hands on a real keyboard.
Someone's broken code doesn't display in my browser, I say that fact and that's trolling? Some people shouldn't have mod points at all.
The usage demonstration in the video reminded me of an old rotary telephone. It seems very slow and awkward to use.
I think it is correlated to the number of Somalian pirates
Really, this makes me think of chorded keyboards like the Twiddler. Sure I could learn it eventually, but I think it'd still be slower than Swype or even than hunt & peck on a reasonably-sized on-screen keyboard. The main thing I think this is addressing is inaccuracy in hitting keys on an on-screen keyboard, and it's doing it in what feels to me like a very Rube Goldberg-esque manner.
Hell, I'm not even programming for Android and I think I could reimplement Graffiti faster than I could get comfortable with writing with this.
fencepost
just a little off
While keyboard has its problems, this thing is so foreign that it makes the learning curve too steep to even consider by a busy person.
On the other hand, Palm's Graffiti system is simple and effective. Back in the day, I was using graffiti quickly and easily. It should be used here as well.
Further, what about foreign entry? Not so sure their "commonly used characters" notion works as well when used in a non-English scenario. So while keyboard style entry is not the most appropriate method for mobile devices, it is the most natural one for various reasons.
I hate "swipe" too. Like it or not, key-style entry is the way that works best for humans because we use computers. The layout of the keys is the way we are most accustomed. The rare adoption of the "Dvorak" layout is a sign that it has essentially been rejected by the masses in spite of how long it has been around.
The problem of keyboards on mobile/pocket devices will not likely be solved by anything "too new." Graffiti attempts to solve the problem in a way that resembles handwriting recognition and is far more natural. What's more, for more complex characters, drawing them as I did with kana and kanji characters on the palm devices also worked. So if there is a replacement for the keyboard, it needs to be based on something people already do. Hopefully people still know how to write.
But you CAN resign from the Needlessly Point out Others' Flaws department.
I'm wasting my breath of course, but the good old Iambic Morse Paddle does all of this and is simple and easy to learn. Faster too.
(the dual paddle "squeeze key", not the old style morse key)
If it gets close or even hits the speed of handwriting, that's nice. But we type, in part, because typing is faster than hand-writing.
This is not going to be as fast as a keyboard.
Blind Type looks much more interesting and easy to use, if you are used to keyboard typing.
If you are going to have to make arcane gestures for each letter, you might as well go the route of optical character recognition. At least that way, you don't have to learn a whole new way to write each letter for your mobile device.
I still have a Handspring Visor.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
i thought that keyboards where around long before the age of computers...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Oh, this is nice, they're doing exactly what Dasher does but you have to pay money for it.
Just waiting for the patent trolls.
It is not a common misconception. In fact you just made the GPs point. The keys would jam because the hammers were being actuated in such a way that one would still be in its swiping range while the other started its own action. This resulted in hammers jamming. By rearranging the keys so that typing was slower the hammers had more time to get out of each others way. In other words, you were both correct (except the part about the misconception")
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Heck, i remember when we used to hook up the mule to the cart and drive to Pennsylvania (the whole way there and back was uphill... in a snowstorm!)
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
Despite a tag being deprecated, safari is being irresponsible by not implementing it. I can remember when IE implemented a new rendering engine and "broke the internet"
I guess it doesn't matter when an insignificant market share holder doesn't do things properly. People just use what works in the end.
'Nuff said.
That may be true, but QWERTY was created before the understanding of typing mechanics and ergonomics, and thus missed out on a lot of easy optimizations. For example, when you drum your fingers on the desk, it's much easier to drum pinky->index then index-> pinky. Dvorak layout takes advantage of this.
I can type 100+ words per minute in either layout after a little warm-up. I *much* prefer to type at that speed in Dvorak than in qwerty. It feels a lot more comfortable.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
I think the key thing about this is that you won't have to "think" anymore when you input text. Right now, if I type on my PC keyboard, I don't think about typing. I think the words, and my hands automatically make them appear. Same thing when I write; I think the words, and my the words appear on the paper by themselves.
However, typing on a phone, is actually fairly involved. You do have to "think" about it. Your eyes need to find the key, and carefully control your finger so it taps in the correct spot. Even Swype requires quite a bit of attention, since you need to guide your fingers to very specific spots.
This thing, however, requires no real "accuracy." You simply move your finger up, down, left, or right, and then do circles, curves, or figure eights. Once you memorize the placement of keys, inputting text is just swishing your finger around without thinking; without even looking at the letters (see how at the end it suggests maybe just getting rid of everything, except the center point?)
----
Basically, the general attitude about writing on mobile devices is "Who cares about writing a lot on your phone? If you want to write a long email, use a computer." But why does it have to be like that? Why can't you comfortably type something long on a phone? It's because the QWERTY layout doesn't work for that, and probably never will, no matter how much prediction and auto-correction is thrown on.
First off, this looks like a nightmare to learn... Why do" hunt and peck" typists type so slow? It's not the "peck" part... Completely rearranging a keyboard is a sure way to give yourself a 100 meter sheer cliff of a learning curve... If you've used a keyboard frequently for a couple years, qwerty is so hard coded in your muscle memory that switching to a simple alphabetical layout is painful. I say this as a dual dvorak/qwerty typist, who has extensively used (not just toyed with) a great many small-format mobile devices over decades (typing on my droid2 right now).
The immutible facts I've learned from all this is that:
A) The best mobile devies out there today have barely made any improvements over the PDAs of 10+ years ago. I'm hard-pressed to come up with something an iphone/droid does that my Cassiopeia E-100 or Psion 5mx couldn't do way back when.
B) The keyboard is still the overwhelimingly fastest and easiest way to input any amout of data. Yeah, even a couple digits, its still faster to flip out a full keyboards. For getting actual work done, nothing I've seen to this day compares with my old Psion 5mx for the simple reason that it has a keyboard large enough to touch type on, yet fits in a pocket.
I could list 100 other reasons too, starting with a B&W LCD viewable in any light, and so low power it remains on for several minutes of inactivity... and similarly, the keyboard as well as other buttons that are always functional thanks to a flip-open case design that avoids the need for cumbersome speedbumps like screen unlock sequences. And did I mention it was made to be tethered to cell phones for wireless internet from the very start? And that it allowed writing up full office documents with common formatting, embedding of other documents and files, and even directly printing these documents to any printer with IRDA (or wired serial) quite easily? Psion, of course, became Symbian, and never reclaimed its vaunted position as the neceassary tool of the business travler.
The month of battery life was a nice feature too... but what do we have now? The same battery life on a smartphone that I was getting from an E-100 circa '00.
But I digress. The idea of kinda-sorta-like-writing idea was tried repeatedly in the PDA days as well, with a forward loop being an A, backward loop being an O, and the like. It wasn't workable then, and I don't see a tiny target area with a scrambled alphabet helping. If you can't get full qwerty, 10-key is probably next-best. On-screen pseudo keyboards need to die already. And while slide out qwerty is infinitely better than nothing, a device you can set on your desk/armrest makes the difference between the toy phones out there, and a real, productive computing device. Of course rock-solid apps with a good interface and desktop equivalent features are needed, but a full-speed input deice is a prereq, and nothing comes close to competing with the tried and true touch-type keyboard.
Yeah, i know, tablets make nice toys too despite to lack of keyboards, just like PDAs did, and were projected to take over the world in their heyday as well...
Until devices like that start coming out (again...) write off the smartphone's delusions of grandure and large budget advertising to the same effect, and accept that a netbook is the smallest device you're going to be able to find on which you can actually do non-trivial amounts of work. Yes, the neato-factor convinces people their teeny device with a web browser can do everything their desktop can do, but the shine fades quickly, and with much pain and money spent, you'll merely learn the exact same things I've stated above.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I've tested a similar app on my PalmPilot 10 years ago. Although I can't find the original app any more, http://www.thumbscript.com/ seems quite close to that.
That was hard to use at that time, but the visual layout here may make it easier.
... especially Swype on a non-qwerty key layout. Come on, we already know that it is better to spread out those often-used chars...
And maybe someone can figure out a way to make my fingers transparent so I can finally see where that next key is I want to swype to... :-)
As the author of Pentaput, yet another writing tool for the iPhone, I have some experience with the kind of problems with this concept.
The main problem is that the friction on the screen varies a lot, depending on temperature and amount of finger grease on the screen.
When slippery, it works quite O.K., but else wise, which is the usual, just touching ordinary small keys works slightly better.
I might find a solution to this, if I had the time, but I do not.
The size of the highlighted letter is too small with all that free space they need to make it pop huge. It should obviously appear in the center since that is the only place your finger won't go.
This is what you're talking about:
http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-access_company-graffiti-jjziA.aspx
As an ex-TealScript user, this is a sorry thing to be using: it's Graffiti 1, it's not customisable in any way, it still takes up half the bloody screen, and as you say is hard to use with a sausage-sized stylus.
What caught my eye was around 3:44 in the video -- the part where they say that you really only need the dot or central ring -- it would be very awesome indeed if this turns out to be a transparent keyboard that can be shown over the actual UI. I'm keeping an eye on this, but I don't dare hope.
"Good news, everyone!"
This is what you're talking about:
http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-access_company-graffiti-jjziA.aspx
As an ex-TealScript user, this is a very sorry thing to be using: it's Graffiti 1, it's not customisable in any way, it still takes up half the bloody screen, and as you say is hard to use with a sausage-sized stylus.
What did catch my eye was around 3:44 in the video -- the part where they say that you really only need the dot or central ring -- it would be very awesome indeed if this turns out to be a transparent keyboard that can be shown over the actual UI. I'm keeping an eye on this, but I don't dare hope.
Or just give me TealScript for Android...
"Good news, everyone!"
Having learned one set of gestures on my 1st Palm and a 2nd set when things changed to Graffiti 2, and gone into frustration-mode when they got dropped, this seems like a reasonably good idea.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm in no rush to use either of these since I have a device with a physical keyboard and they totally neglect thumb typing in all of the scenarios discussed. As far as the size, it doesn't look like it takes up much more room than the regular software keyboard, so I don't see that as a uniquely serious drawback.
The first link in the original post is to the product home page. It does seem to be the same thing you're referring to. There are also videos on that page that look fairly compelling. Their FAQ makes it seem like they do plan to add customization at some point.
Something that can be operated with one hand using the thumb would be ideal. There were also some interesting motion input strategies back when Palm was de rigueur, but they were all proprietary and expensive and went nowhere at the time.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
One-handed messaging is usually performed with the thumb. The thumb can easily push the little buttons on the small keyboard of a mobile phone, or the virtual keyboards of newer phones, but it cannot do cyclic movements consistently without being strained too much.
If you are curious about this, take a small glass and try to wipe it using your thumb by doing circular movements. Sooner than later, you'll feel the pain.