10 May 2005

Hiroshi Shimodaira

As mobile and wearable computing devices have become popular, a number of text input interfaces as substitutes for keyboard interface have been developed. If we assume much smaller devices than PDAs, i.e. cellular phones or a small touch-pad attached to human bodies for wearable computing, handwriting interface would be the most natural interface widely accepted by the users, while button interface is preferred by a limited number of users.

To take full advantage of handwriting interface, we assume that the users are allowed to write characters continuously without watching them. Under the assumed condition, characters are written one after another without pauses on a small writing area, with the result that written characters are heavily distorted and overlaid each other. Conventional handwriting recognition engines, however, can not handle this sort of handwritings. To tackle the problem, we employ the state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition technologies, and develop special handwriting input devices for different styles of wearable computing.

In the talk, I will show a prototype system and several handwriting input devices, one of which is for handwriting in the air. In addition to that, I will introduce a handwriting interface for the visually impaired people, which is one of the applications of the eyesfree handwriting interface.

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