New-age keyboard: Trace, don't write

Shark shorthand

It may not be long before you can input data into your smart phone using a space-age Etch-a-Sketch. IBM has come up with an experimental keyboard system that lets users write by connecting the dots.

Shark (Shorthand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding) is an advanced pen-based shorthand method that allows users to input words into mobile devices by tracing them letter by letter on a virtual keyboard. Instead of tapping independently on four virtual keys with a stylus to spell "word," for example, consumers would put the stylus on "w" and then carve a continuous trail all the way to "d."

"What we are doing is creating a human-machine code," said Shumin Zhai, a research staff member at IBM Almaden Research Center, said during a presentation at the New Paradigms for Using Computers conference in Silicon Valley on Monday. "It uses geometrical patterns to represent words." As an aside, he added, "We're back to carving symbols on rocks."

Users initially hunt for letters to write words, but the idea is that they fairly rapidly start to memorise the shape of common words and word components -- and therefore, their dependence on visual guidance decreases. The computer assesses the user's final pattern, interprets it as a word from its database and turns it into text on the screen.

Shark, which has been in beta since October 2004, remains a lab project, but it shows promise, said Zhai, who added that after four training sessions, users were able to memorise about 60 patterns. "That covers about 40 percent of the words (and word components) that people commonly employ," Zhai maintains.

The growing popularity of smart phones is prompting researchers and companies to develop input systems that will work optimally with those devices.

"Laptops are not really mobile devices," said Ian Smith, a researcher at Intel Labs in Seattle. "They are effectively nomadic devices."

Consumers have adapted to the standard QWERTY keyboard, but these keyboards are generally too large to tote around with mobile devices. Some companies have come out with projection keyboards that project a laser image of a QWERTY board. The keyboards are light, but require a flat, even surface, said Zhai -- not always easy to find on a bumpy train ride.