One of my biggest problem with tablets is the issue of typing on them. There’s limited tactile feedback; sure you can get haptic, but you still can’t feel your way around the keys. Considering the limited tactile feedback, there are too many “keys” too close together. And since you need both hands to be at all efficient on a standard QWERTY, you have to go find someplace to set the sucker down so you can treat it like a keyboard. Adam Kumpf must have felt the same way, because he’s developed a one-handed tablet keyboard that solves almost all of these problems.
The brainchild of Doug Engelbart, the one-handed keyboard is founded on the principle that you generally hold a tablet with one hand, and want to type with the other; sort of the way Swype is designed to work. As you can see in the picture, the keyboard is made up of five hotspots, one for each of the fingers, alleviating the cramped nature of your typical tablet keyboard. Using these hotspots, you enter characters by pressing down different fingers in different combinations. Simple enough, right?
Including all-fingers-on and all-fingers-off, this allows for a total of 32 combinations, which is enough to cover the standard alphabet with a little bit of wiggle room for punctuation as well. It might have a little bit of a learning curve, but in my experience, all the best input interfaces do. If you happen to be on a tablet right now, you can try this out at Adam’s demo page, which works on most tablets — even iDevices — although I can’t verify that myself, being tablet-less and all. That being said, the development of interesting input systems like this makes me way more interested in picking up a tab in the future. There must be some way to get it right, right?
(via Hack a Day)
