Those of
us working with the Roman alphabet forget how spoiled we are with our QWERTY keyboards, even if they were originally
designed to slow us down. People using non-Roman characters never forget that these keyboards weren't designed for
them, and have spent decades searching for alternatives. The latest, developed by HP Labs India, is the gesture-based
keyboard, which is actually a pen tablet that uses a stroke-based system to recognize characters in non-Roman
languages. It was designed specifically to deal with languages in use in the subcontinent, such as Tamil and Kannada,
but has potential for other Asian languages as well. The system was designed to be rugged, and to be usable by people
with no prior experience with keyboards or the Roman alphabet. HP expects to license the technology to a third-party
manufacturer for commercialization.
posted Mar 17th 2006 11:05AM
we've had these pads in asia for years now. i bought one when i was in taiwan about five years ago to write chinese with.
lol I bet none of you have ever heard of the language Kannada, but I speak it and I'm glad to see its getting some publicity :)
...and soon HP plans to release colour photo technology.
On a serious note though, this is pretty cool.
LOL #3 - seriously... "Stand perfectly still for the next twenty-seven minutes."
umm, the chinese have been doing this for YEARS.
how is this, in anyway, news?
"...even if they were originally designed to slow us down"
Some consider this claim false:
http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html
Dermot81
That makes 2 of us!
Why is the picture taken in the 60s?
"People using non-Roman characters never forget that these keyboards weren't designed for them"
Yea, they just need to press SHIFT-4 to realize this... ;-)
tamil and kannada. holler.
LoL, I didn't know they had LCD panels back in the 60's
#1 is correct. This is old news.
Have to agree with number one, bought me a pad when I was in China, 6 years back. Pitty I lost the cd with all the software.
I use a transliterated keyboard for தமிழ் now that feels almost natural. I wonder if the retraining for gesture recognition is really useful?
This is a very good tool for vernacular community.
Lately, we in Europe or America have a similar technique for entering text in non-keyboard situations. It is called for example "graffiti" - pen-gestures representing textual characters. Not so new, that idea... :)