US 2017/0003872 A1 -
Touch Encoded Keyboard)
Read the complete Patent/invention (US 2017/0003872 A1 — Touch Encoded Keyboard) here: http://patents.justia.com/patent/20170003872
Read it in YourStory at: https://yourstory.com/read/5f95c7528f-the-smallest-virtual-keyboard-that-can-fit-into-any-wearable-
Read it in LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/smallest-virtual-keyboard-can-fit-any-wearable-samir-dash
The “BlueSlide”keyboard concept utilizes combination of multiple fingers slide across the touch enabled display or panel to trigger key-input to the system for based on predefined key mappings. The proposed concept uses different combinations of minimum one to any number of fingers to slide over the touch panel. The minimum touch enabled surface dimension can be the width of one finger tip area or less in physical dimension.
There are many areas this new keyboard layout solved challenges —
1. Solves problem of input of text on a real-estate constrained devices like wearable-devices (watches, wrist wears) or mobile devices with or without the touch enabled displays.
2. Simpler implementation that does not need to identify the finger and track them . Also does not need to track hand orientation. As less parameters are required to processed by the system to map the characters, it is lightweight and effective in it’s implementation and can be used in smaller less resource consuming devices .
3. Can work on a touch panel that is only single-touch sensitive — It uses sequence of consecutive touch inputs and their directions to simulate a multi-finger touch case to map to a wider number of characters.
4. Completely unique input text keyboard embodiment that uses directional swipe gestures of single/multi-fingers swipe gestures and does not require on conventional virtual keyboard approach to tap on characters to input text /characters.
5.The complete keyboard solution can work on smallest display area/touch area which can be as small as just one tap area.
6.The invention proposes the complete text input method based on swipe gestures (using any single or multiple fingers without requiring to identify each finger ) and interaction paradigm to cover all sets of characters of any language including special characters
7. The embodiment suggests the use of multiple views of the keyboard to accommodate any number of characters in keyboard along with the interaction approach on how to switching between these views.
Alternate implementation of BlueSlide: Using super minimal real estate on a non-display type thin touch panel.
Another non-optimal special type of implementation of BlueSlide is provided in the following, where to allow real estate for other UI elements like more input fields /information etc., the keyboard touch area is reduced even further to somewhat around 7mm x 7mm (i.e. the touch area of single finger tip) on a screen area constrained device. The following image shows this example, where only single finger swipe with increased number of keyboard views are used to input data into the system. Depending on the implementation this can be further reduced to one square millimeter of touch surface.
