Text Input on a Smart Watch

Abstract

T ext entry is a key component of many smartphone applications. The recent release of smart watches has met considerable interest, but without text entry, interaction is frustratingly limited-users can see posts, short messages, and emails but can't reply using the watch. As part of our ongoing work, we outline a text entry approach for smart watches, describe our initial prototype, and discuss the outcomes of our lab-based evaluation of the prototype. Text Entry on Small DevicesBefore the widespread adoption of touchscreen smartphones, 12-key physicalkeypad phones were the most common text entry method on small devices. Predictive technologies interpreted the ambiguous keys (usually three or four letters per key) and suggested words. 1,2 This approach was shown to achieve speeds of approximately 10 words per minute (wpm) for novices and 20 to 25 wpm for experts in controlled studies. 3 In a previous study, we investigated this approach using a reduced number of keys for text entry on watches, but we implemented it on a touchscreen handheld device. 4 In theory, 12key ambiguous predictive text quality could be very high (over 90 percent accurate), but in reality, each key sequence could match many different words, and some of these sequences included pairs of common words that caused problems. (For example, on a standard phone keypad, "he" and "if" are typed with the same keys.) The early models of prediction were based on simple unigram dictionary models that suggested the most common word matching a sequence. Nowadays, phones have much more power and memory, so they can easily support more complex prediction models, greatly reducing the impact of ambiguity.Alternative approaches for input on small devices include handwriting, 5 fast but difficultto-learn chord keyboards, 6 and specialized alphabets. 7 Many domestic appliances, such as televisions and games, use a date-stamp-inspired method, where the user scrolls through the alphabet and picks letters from a 2D line or 3D grid. However, this has been shown to be a slow entry method. 8 Finally, gesture wordbased input techniques offer great benefits for mobile phones and can provide a fast and more relaxing input method than continuously tapping small on-screen buttons. 9 There is currently very little work focusing on text entry for smart watches. One such method is Zoomboard, where a full qwerty keyboard is shrunk to fill the smart-watch screen. 10 Users tap once to zoom into a keyboard area and a second time to select a letter from that area. Although shown to be good enough for input speeds up to 9 wpm, this interaction method lacks suggestion support and increases the number of interactions, because additional input is required for zooming. Furthermore, this Although smart watches let users receive many forms of communication, there is usually no direct way of replying. The authors introduce an interaction design and an optimized alphabetic layout for smart-watch text entry and present an evaluation using a working prototype.

VelociTap

“…Zoomboard [16]) or larger ambiguous keys (e.g. [11]). An interesting challenge is whether a hybrid system could allow seamlessly switching between sentence-based decoding and other approaches.…”

Collaboration And Awareness Amongst Flight Attendants

“…Their user study with 16 participants, and with Zoomboard as a baseline technique, revealed that the prototype supports novice to expert behaviors and improves a users' performance to achieving a high entry speed (19.58 words per minute (WPM), 15% faster than the existing baseline technique) (Chen et al, 2014). Similarly, Komninos & Dunlop (2014) prototype is similar to a QWERTY keyboard and divides the keyboard into six large keys (Oney et al, 2013;Chen et al, 2014;Komninos & Dunlop, 2014) Other researchers explored how smartwatches can assist in gaining awareness of team members, coordinating their activities, and displaying contextual information. However, they did not perform a usability study with users to test their prototype.…”

Virtual Sliding QWERTY: A new text entry method for smartwatches using Tap-N-Drag

“…Instead of the physical button recent studies have developed text input methods based on touchscreen interface Komninos and Dunlop, 2014;Cho et al, 2014). Oney et al (2013) proposed ZoomBoard based on a qwerty keyboard layout Table 1 Summary of major related researches.…”

“…However, it is time consuming because the system requires zoom in/out repeatedly to select letters. Komninos and Dunlop (2014) proposed a 6 key layout which group 3 to 5 letters from the alphabets (Fig. 1b).…”

“…Secondly, only a few studies have conducted usability tests for validating their own method Komninos and Dunlop (2014); Funk et al, 2014), and their performances were relatively slower than the text entry speed for the iPhone and Android phone: 15.8, and 21.4 WPM respectively (Ariff et al, 2010;Catellucci and MacKenzie, 2011). Thirdly, the recent methods by Oney et al (2013), Komninos and Dunlop (2014), Cho et al (2014), andFunk et al (2014) required multi-touches to select a target letter. Finally, the previous studies lack consideration of an optimal key size for an index or middle finger which is expected to be mainly used on smartwatches.…”