Almaden Research Center -- - -- --

Shape Writing Technology

Advanced mobile phones, hand-held devices, PDAs and Tablet PCs are becoming very powerful computing platforms. They can be as powerful as today's desktop computers in the near future and will play an increasingly central role in personal and ubiquitous computing. The question of how a user can efficiently interact with these devices without the traditional mouse and keyboard has motivated us to invest years of research in this area. The result is ShapeWriter, previously known as "Shorthand Aided Rapid Keyboarding (SHARK)". Hailed as a revolutionay breackthrough by early users and techology reviewers, ShapeWriter's long term technology vision is to become a pervasive writing method on all forms of off-the-desktop computing devices from handsets to touch sensing wall displays. Its short term role is to enable easy, fast and fun text input on touchscreen mobile phones.

• ShapeWriter Inc Home Page  

• ShapeWriter in the press

• ShapeWriter video on YouTube

• Research Papers

• Command Strokes

Demo of ShapeWriter on ATOMIK (698KB)

Demo of ShapeWriter on QWERTY (1.6MB)

Shape writing is easy. Rather than tapping individual keys, one simply draws a continuous line from letter to letter on a graphical keyboard. The resulting pattern is recognized by ShapeWriter as a “sokgraph” (Shorthand On Keyboard as a GRAPH). For example, the trace p-o-w-e-r forms the "power" (see the left figure above).

Shape writing works on QWERTY and other graphical keyboard layouts. Customized layouts can be made for special purposes or different languages. For high performance, we have designed a layout based on ATOMIK, an optimized graphical on screen keyboard. Sokgraphs defined on this layout are efficient to produce, tolerant to error, and easy to remember.

The following factors make shape writing particularly powerful.

Efficiency: Rather than articulating one letter at a time (longhand), shape writing allows the user to write word level sokgraphs ­ a form of shorthand.

Human sensitivity to geometric patterns: A person’s ability to recognize, memorize and draw patterns is remarkable. Shape writing capitalizes on this remarkable human capability. Drawing patterns with a stylus is fluid, dexterous and fun.

Intelligent pattern recognition: ShapeWriter is "intelligent". The number of legitimate words (ranging from thousands to tens of thousands in a lexicon) is only a fraction of the number of all letter permutations (tens of millions). ShapeWriter takes advantage of the regularities of words formation and recognizes user's ink trace on keyboard with maximum flexibility and error tolerance. An intended word can still be recognized although irrelevant letters between intended letters are crossed or even if some of the letters in a word are missed in the stylus trace.

Ease of learning: Shape writing bridges initial ease of use with eventual high performance by embedding learning in use. In psychology terms, for initial ease of use, the user interface needs to be recognition-based – action by visual guidance. To reach high performance, however, the user interface should support recall-based skills. In shape writing, these two modes are gradually connected. One shifts from recognition to recall over time. The graphical keyboard serves as a visual map and a training wheel from careful visual tracing towards a fluid form of shorthand writing.

Ease of error correction: Underneath each word in ShapeWriter's text stream editor is a list of probable alternative words that can be selected with one additional pen stroke. One can also delete or insert words anywhere in the text stream editor.

ShapeWriter also supports Command Strokes - a fluid and efficient form of pen-based command and menu selection.

For more information and licensing opportunities please go to ShapeWriter Inc.