projects

text-entry methods for tabletop displays

Although text entry is a vital part of day-to-day computing familiar to most people, not much research has been done to enable text entry on large interactive tables. One might assume that a good approach would be to choose an existing technique known to be fast, ergonomic, and currently preferred by the general population, but there are many additional factors to consider in this specific domain.

We approach this problem from two sides: we consider how existing text-entry methods can fit into the tabletop environment along with developing techniques that are specifically designed considering the unique characteristics of interactive tables.

BubbleType is a text-entry method developed for walk-up-and-use interfaces on tabletop displays. Two variations of BubbleType were designed: a rather traditional qwerty keyboard and a circular keyboard.

Uta Hinrichs, Mark S. Hancock, Christopher Collins and Sheelagh Carpendale. Examination of Text-Entry Methods for Tabletop Displays. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems (Tabletop'07). IEEE, pages 105-112, October, 2007.

Uta Hinrichs, Holly Schmidt, Tobias Isenberg, Mark S. Hancock and Sheelagh Carpendale. BubbleType: Enabling Text Entry within a Walk-Up Tabletop Installation. Research report 2008-893-06, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Canada, February, 2008.