Yet another finger keybord (gui mock-up).

[michael at michaelshiloh.com]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2007, Ian Stirling wrote:

> Gabriel Ambuehl wrote:
>>  On Monday 05 March 2007 11:34:47 Lars Hallberg wrote:
>> >  Should be as clear as on the pictures... But You might need to look
>> >  close... But the neo case have a hole for the nose for that special
>>
>>  Clear yes, but also about 3 times smaller than on your desktop screen...
>> 
>> >  purpose :-) Hopefully, You soon learn where the keys are.
>>
>>  Which gives rise to the question of how to best arrange them...
>
>
> Ideally - if designing it from a completely clean sheet, you want it so that 
> 'typos' result in very different letters.
>
>  a
> e 0 i
>   o
>
> would be a spectacularly bad pick, for example, whereas
>
>  a
> d 0 q
>   f
>
> might be good.
>
> This is so autocorrection software can function well.


How about making use of AI techniques and having the layout self-adjust to
generate a layout that pushes frequently used letters to the right places, and
then arranges the surrounding letters to reduce typos? If this consumes too
much processing power for normal use, there could be a separate "learning"
mode during which you would tolerate the slowness, and later switch to fixed
mode. Or it could be like SpamAssassin - keystrokes (both correct and
incorrect) are logged in some efficient way, and later you can "train" the
layout "engine" when the device is not in use, perhaps even pushing the
processing to a different computer.

Additionally, one might even have different layouts for different activities -
emailing friends might have a different vocabulary, and hence suggest a
different layout, than C programming. Although I recognize that at some point
the inefficiency of remembering the layout in different modes offsets any
advantage of the layout efficiency. But, having the choice might be
interesting. At the very least I may want to experiment with a new layout but
retain the ability to switch back to a previous layout.

I know, somewhat extreme, but at this early brainstorming stage I like
thinking extreme.

Michael