Text-entry aims to provide an effective and efficient pathway for humans to deliver their messages to computers. With the advent of mobile computing, the recent focus of text-entry research has moved from physical keyboards to soft keyboards. Current soft keyboards, however, increase the typo rate due to lack of tactile feedback and degrade the usability of mobile devices due to their large portion on screens. To tackle these limitations, we propose a fully imaginary keyboard (I-Keyboard) with a deep neural decoder (DND). The invisibility of I-Keyboard maximizes the usability of mobile devices and DND empowered by a deep neural architecture allows users to start typing from any position on the touch screens at any angle. To the best of our knowledge, the eyes-free ten-finger typing scenario of I-Keyboard which does not necessitate both a calibration step and a predefined region for typing is first explored in this work. For the purpose of training DND, we collected the largest user data in the process of developing I-Keyboard. We verified the performance of the proposed I-Keyboard and DND by conducting a series of comprehensive simulations and experiments under various conditions. I-Keyboard showed 18.95 and 4.06 increases in typing speed (45.57 WPM) and accuracy (95.84 ), respectively over the baseline.
Last but not least, imaginary keyboards, which are invisible to users, save invaluable screen resources and enables multi-tasking in the context of mobile computing @cite_27 . Imaginary keyboards reduce constraints during interaction and users can freely and comfortably deliver their messages. In addition, the imaginary keyboards coincide with the potent vision for user interfaces (UI) which has evolved from mechanical, graphical and gestural UI to imaginary UI, achieving tighter embodiment and more directness @cite_18 . Conventional works on imaginary UI, however, have only shown the feasibility not reaching the practical deployment level. Our I-Keyboard proposes a new concrete concept for imaginary UI and demonstrates the practical implementation of the concept deployed in a real-world environment.
@cite_27 @cite_18
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The lack of dedicated multitasking interface features in smartphones has resulted in users attempting a sequential form of multitasking via frequent app switching. In addition to the obvious temporal cost, it requires physical and cognitive effort which increases multifold as the back and forth switching becomes more frequent. We propose porous interfaces, a paradigm that combines the concept of translucent windows with finger identification to support efficient multitasking on small screens. Porous interfaces enable partially transparent app windows overlaid on top of each other, each of them being accessible simultaneously using a different finger as input. We design porous interfaces to include a broad range of multitasking interactions with and between windows, while ensuring fidelity with the existing smartphone interactions. We develop an end-to-end smartphone interface that demonstrates porous interfaces. In a qualitative study, participants found porous interfaces intuitive, easy, and useful for frequent multitasking scenarios. There have been several recent examples of user interface techniques in which the user uses a computational device by physically manipulating the device. This paper proposes that these form an interesting new paradigm for user interface design, Embodied User Interfaces. This paper presents and defines this paradigm, and places it in the evolution of user interface paradigms leading towards the ideal of an invisible user interface. This paper outlines the space of design possibilities in this paradigm, presents a design framework for embodied user interface design, and articulates a set of design principles to guide design.