Improving Virtual Keyboards When All Finger Positions Are Known

Abstract

Current virtual keyboards are known to be slower and less convenient than physical QWERTY keyboards because they simply imitate the traditional QWERTY keyboards on touchscreens. In order to improve virtual keyboards, we consider two reasonable assumptions based on the observation of skilled typists. First, the keys are already assigned to each finger for typing. Based on this assumption, we suggest restricting each finger to entering pre-allocated keys only. Second, non-touching fingers move in correlation with the touching finger because of the intrinsic structure of human hands. To verify of our assumptions, we conducted two experiments with skilled typists. In the first experiment, we statistically verified the second assumption. We then suggest a novel virtual keyboard using our observations. In the second experiment, we show that our suggested keyboard outperforms existing virtual keyboards.