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The Challenge of Getting a Usable QWERTY Keyboard Onto a Dime-sized Screen
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from Spain and Germany are building on Carnegie Mellon's work to attempt to create workable text-input interfaces for wearables, smartwatches and a new breed of IoT devices too small to accomodate even the truncated soft keyboards familiar to phone users. In certain cases, the screen area in which the keyboard must be made usable is no bigger than a dime. Of all the commercial input systems I've used, Graffiti seems like it might be the most suited to such tiny surfaces.
...would dictate we look to other methods of input rather than re-engineering the wheel to fit inside a thimble.
Care to tell me why my IoT device wouldn't simply report into a web server, where another device would serve as the input mechanism?
Frankly I find it laughable that we assume any IoT device would not be reporting all of it's data to a central server. It's kind of the whole point of IoT, for vendors to sell you back your own data and tie it to online alerting systems that can easily be interfaced through a browser or phone app.
Take out your smartphone and type it there. If you're trying to do something that takes more than a couple clicks on a smartwatch, you're doing it wrong.
I think it's a stupid idea. The "smart watch" technology is great for ALERTS and maybe simple push button replies and can integrate fine with a phone or tablet. But trying to use it as a "phone" or a "computer" is silly.
Voice-to-text input is an option and Siri/Cortana or whatever your flavor does a decent job but the function would be a battery hog.
Just let the watch be like an "extra" display and stop trying to make it in to a Dick Tracy watch/video-phone.
Might I suggest Morse code. Fast people with Morse can exceed the fastest texters. Seems extremely plausible.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.