4 ms·
This is good because it's spatial. The last really spatial typing method is the traditional number pad. And it's reaaaally good despite the necessity of having
by yason 16y ago
This is good because it's spatial. The last really spatial typing method is the traditional number pad. And it's reaaaally good despite the necessity of having to press each button several times most of the time.
A spatial method can be applied without seeing the screen. The speed and ease of spatial methods comes from the deterministic and predictable behaviour: you learn physical finger patterns instead of reading the screen and adjusting yourself all the time. So, in other words, it's one-way input instead of two-way interactive typing.
If the screen surface had a tiny little dot embossed to the center, blind writing would be even easier. The 8pen looks a bit weird though, so people might have a hard time figuring it out first. If the quadrants were aligned to 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees it might be easier to grasp. Also, I hope the center isn't mandatory: you could just start from quadrant n and move over to quadrant n+1, lift your finger, and start over.
- veritgo 16y agoCenter appears to be mandatory. They use gestures started outside of the center as 'macros', able to be custom bound to frequently used phrases or words.
- anateus 16y agoWell, it isn't actually spatial. Keyboards are nice because after a while the location of each key is encoded in your brain. Swype and its ilk (ShapeWriter, SlideIT) take advantage of that by piggybacking on your already learned spatial knowledge. This, however, is gestural rather than spatial: each letter is encoded via an action, rather than a point in space. What this means is that there is the same cap on efficiency as with handwriting. Perhaps the best marriage of what 8pen is trying to do is basically something like Swype, but on a keyboard layout that's optimized for the cramped space. The pre-encoded spatial information will be sacrificed for greater eventual efficiency. You would start out tapping, then graduate to the spatial gestures. (Re: the center, yes it's mandatory. They use non-center gestures as macro storage)
- yason 16y agoWell, it actually is spatial. For what I saw, the input screen always seems to be the same and in the same location, thus the input method is spatial. That is, you learn approxximately how far each segment is from your handgrip and you can then whirl your finger around the correct quadrants to produce letters, even without looking. Pretty much how you operate a keyboard once you correctly learn the locations of letters. A gestural interface would allow you to do, well, gestures. A gesture is like a vector: it has no location. You might learn that 'e' comes from "starting from top, two segments to the right" but that gesture wouldn't have a meaning unless you start from the correct location in the screen space.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoOT for attention of anateus: in relation to this, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485331 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485331, could you perhaps look at http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/e341c/reddit_i_found_this_2x2_inch_clay_square_in_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/e341c/reddit_i_found_t... - there's an attempted transliteration in the comments.