By using TypeBoard, users can rest their hands on tablets without worrying about unintentional touches. Leveraging this advantage, we proposed ResType to solve two more problems in tablet text entry. Firstly, the soft keyboard occupies a large amount of screen space, affecting the access to information. Secondly, due to the lack of tactile feedback, users cannot locate keys without visual attention, causing additional visual attention switches while typing. Based on TypeBoard, ResType allows users to rest hands on the tablet, similar to how physical keyboard users align their fingers using the landmarks on the home row. Then, ResType adapts an invisible virtual keyboard to users’ resting hands, enabling efficient touch typing. Please refer to our paper for more details.
Paper Abstract
Text entry on tablet touchscreens is a basic need nowadays. Tablet keyboards require visual attention for users to locate keys, thus not supporting efficient touch typing. They also take up a large proportion of screen space, which affects the access to information. To solve these problems, we propose ResType, an adaptive and invisible keyboard on three-state touch surfaces (e.g. tablets with unintentional touch prevention). ResType allows users to rest their hands on it and automatically adapts the keyboard to the resting fingers. Thus, users do not need visual attention to locate keys, which supports touch typing. We quantitatively explored users’ resting finger patterns on ResType, based on which we proposed an augmented Bayesian decoding algorithm for ResType, with 96.3% top-1 and 99.0% top-3 accuracies. After a 5-day evaluation, ResType achieved 41.26 WPM, outperforming normal tablet keyboards by 13.5% and reaching 86.7% of physical keyboards. It solves the occlusion problem while maintaining comparable typing speed with current methods on visible tablet keyboards.