PDAs, Pen

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PDAs, Pen Gesture

• Jot down a couple notes...

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How to use a PDA
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Personal Digital Asst. PDA
Palm VII
Palm IIIc
Handspring Visor
HP Jornada
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PDAs

• Becoming more common and widely used
• Smaller display (160x160), (320x240)
• Few buttons, interact through pen
• Estimate 14 million shipped by 2004
• Improvements
• Wireless, color, more memory, better CPU, better
  OS

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Input Styles

• Keyboards microkeyboards
• Pen Input

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Pen Input

• Three main techniques
• Free-form ink
• Soft keyboards
• Recognition systems

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Free-form Ink

• Ink is the data, take as is
• Human is responsible for understanding and
  interpretation
• Like a sketch pad

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Soft Keyboards

• Common on PDAs and mobile devices
• Many varieties
• Tapping interface
• Stroking interface

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Tapping Interface

• Presents a small diagram of keyboard
• You click on buttons/keys with pen
• QWERTY vs. alphabetical
• Tradeoffs? Alternatives?

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Tegic Communications-T9

• Tapping interface that uses phone pad
• You press out letters of your word, it matches
  the most likely word, then gives optional choices
• Used in mobile phones
• www.tegic.com/t9

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Cirrin

• Developed by Jen Mankoff (GT)
• Word-level unistroke technique

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Quickwriting

• Ken Perlin -- NYU

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Recognition Systems

• Recognizing letters and numbers
• Special symbols

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Handwriting Recognition

• Lots of systems (commercial too)
• English, kanji, etc.
• Not perfect, but people arent either!
• People - 96 handprinted single characters
• Computer - gt97 is really good
• OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

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Recognition Issues

• Off-line vs. On-line
• Off-line After all writing is done, speed not an
  issue, only quality
• On-line Must respond in real-time
• Bitmapped vs. Vectorized
• Bitmapped Usually off-line, like OCR
• Vectorized On-line, uses angle, direction,
  speed, pressure, acceleration, etc.

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More Issues

• Boxed vs. Free-Form input
• Sometimes encounter boxes on forms
• Printed vs. Cursive
• Cursive is much more difficult
• Letters vs. Words
• Cursive is easier to do words

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More Issues

• Using context words can help
• Usually requires existence of a dictionary
• Check to see if word exists
• Consider 1/I/l
• Training - Many systems improve a lot with
  training data

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Special Alphabets

• Graffiti - Unistroke alphabet on Palm PDA
• Experience?
• Other alphabets or purposes
• Gestures for commands

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Pen Gesture Commands
- Might mean delete
Define a series of (hopefully) simple drawing
gesturesthat mean different commands in a system
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Pen Use Modes

• Often, want a mix of free-form drawing and
  special commands
• Might use visible mode switch
• Might have pen action buttons/switches

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Error Correction

• Having to correct errors can slow input
  tremendously
• Strategies
• Erase and try again
• n-best list
• ...

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Interesting Applications

• Signature verification
• Note-taking
• Academic course
• Corporate meeting
• Sketching systems
• Designers aids