Joystick-like Input Method for Smartwatches | Hacker News Reader

Joystick-like Input Method for Smartwatches

gierad.com

176 pointsdruidsbane32 comments

Makes me wonder how many other interfaces are horribly wrong because everyone has just accepted them. I didn't really think there would be many ways to interact with a smartwatch besides touchscreen and side buttons. And then someone played DOOM on one better than I could do it on my Android phone. Reminds me of how I felt when I first saw pinch to zoom on a capacitive touch screen and realized that it was so natural.

I think one area where people are always doing experiments like this is Android soft keyboards. I've seen so many wacky ways to input text, and some actually work pretty well.

Also today MSFT announced that keyboard research project with gestures, good day for alternative interfaces.

Agreed, what it made me really stop and question is why we DON'T do this with smartphones already and it's because there is no fixed base relative to which we can twist/nudge the screen (as well as a smartphone being too big to be properly grasp-able on all sides for these kind of motions).

Also, it's no coincidence that this and the MSFT keyboard are in the news now, as CHI 2014 (the big Human-Computer Interaction conference) is ongoing now in Toronto: http://chi2014.acm.org

I feel like "flick input" for Japanese on smartphones is actually very very intuitive once you get used to it. I think it will adapt well to this interface too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V-za9LT_30

I've been wondering lately if someone could adapt it to English, with perhaps phonetic groups? Lit swype - it's tricky when you first try it, but soon becomes second nature.

Could you explain what's going on in this video?

The Japanese alphabet is divided up into consonant vowel pairs like

     a i u e o
     ka ki ku ke ko
     ta chi tsu te to etc.

You can see a table on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana

The input system plays on this in that each set has a button, which you press and then release or swipe in one of four directions - thus giving the 5 possible inputs for each one. The modifier key changes a few characters - eg a Ha は can become Ba ば or Pa ぱ ..

    [ a  ][ ka ][ sa ]
    [ ta ][ na ][ ha ]
    [ ma ][ ya ][ ra ]
    [mod ][ wa ][punc]

Then for a single letter you have:

      u
    i a e
      o

So, If I want to input the word for tokyo I'd go:

    down on ta - と (to)
    up on a - う (u)
    left on ka - き (ki)
    down on ya - よ (yo)
    modifier key - convert よ to combining ょ - thus making きょ (kyo)
    up again on a - う (u)

By this point 東京 should appear in the selectable kanji above the keyboard - if not I can press a little chevron to expand the selections.

This was very informative. Thanks!

MessageEase[0] is remarkably similar. Instead of phonetic groups, it puts the most used letters in the easiest locations. With practice, I got my typing speed up to about 40 WPM on it, but I ultimately switched back to Google Keyboard due to the lack of a good autocorrect and prediction system.

[0] http://www.exideas.com/ME/index.php

People have done over 70 wpm with the Fitaly keyboard on Palm devices. See here: http://www.fitaly.com/

This makes so much sense. The screen isn't big enough to be interacted with directly, but interacting with the media on the screen using the body of the device is brilliant.

I feel like this is something that traditional watch designers have known about for a long time. A modern adventuring watch is packed with a slew of chrono/navigation features, yet they're all accessible through the bezel or buttons around the case.

This is a great post that looks like it's falling through the cracks. I suggest you repost it later (you may need to use a slightly different url). When a solid story hasn't yet had significant attention, a small number of reposts are ok.

Edit: Never mind—it didn't fall through the cracks after all, which is great.

> a small number of reposts are ok.

Call me cynical but I have a horrible feeling you might regret that statement.

That said it is a nice approach to the problem :).

It's a balancing act between not wanting lame reposts and not wanting to miss solid articles. Currently, things have trended a bit too far toward missing solid articles.

Usually I add something like: Please don't overdo it. Accounts that repost excessively eventually lose submission privileges. Deleting and reposting is particularly bad—that's an abuse of deletion.

> Deleting and reposting is particularly bad—that's an abuse of deletion.

Maybe augment the guidelines to that effect? Right now it is a feature, one man's use is another mans overdoing it.

We'll do that eventually, but I'm hesitant to change the guidelines very much just yet.

Also, I think it's a mistake to overspecify the rules. We want HN to be a spirit-of-the-law kind of place. A lot of these details can be derived pretty easily from the core values, like "intellectually substantive posts". Accounts that abuse reposting and deletion are almost always just promoting stuff, which is not the same as posting what one personally finds deeply interesting.

But I'm just thinking out loud here. Probably a bad idea. :)

> But I'm just thinking out loud here. Probably a bad idea. :)

Still better than not thinking quietly ;).

Very cool, I feel like when we thought smartwatch, we all thought of another smaller iphone or touch device. This interface is much more in line with actual watches. It's great

Love the video.

It made me think about all of the empty space on a smart watch that could be used more effectively. Buttons or touch surfaces could be built into the wrist strap, and perhaps an alternate location for a joystick like this would be on the opposite side of your wrist from where the screen is positioned.

Now, if only there was a way to cram a halfway-decent typing experience into one of those things...

instead of typing into it, voice recognition is perfect here.

unfortunately, due to the placement on the wrist, they must be small

I don't know if they're small because they're on the wrist or because they're sold as watches.

I don't think I'd be against having a bigger screen on my wrist like control panels that have been seen in SciFi shows for many years :) Something smaller than an iPhone, but maybe like the iPod Nano would work.

I wouldn't be surprised to see them appear soon. Sometimes, I feel that I could use my iPhone on my arm rather than my pocket, when walking for example. But the smart watches tend to have too little screen real estate.

iPhone arm bands definitely exist: http://mashable.com/2012/02/05/best-iphone-armbands/

Certainly, but I think iPhones are too big to be used on a wrist and existing armbands are usually for workouts and for your arm, rather than forearm or wrist.

More importantly, the UI is not done for that use. For example, you might want to lock down the orientation to have the bottom always be towards your body. Apps would also need to be very different, because you'd use it as some kind of dashboard.

There have been wearable computers that can be worn on the wrist for quite a while - they are often used with finger mounted barcode scanners. e.g.

http://www.motorolasolutions.com/XU-EN/Business+Product+and+...

Very nice concept and I think I can really see this taking off. You can then use it as a remote device to larger screens as you wouldn't need to look down at the watch. It reminds me very much of the 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse[1]

My only minor criticism with the demo is the click to take a photo. This would be disastrous as usually people are in low light conditions, it would make you move your hand (and thus camera) and it would introduce camera shake.

[1] https://www.3dconnexion.co.uk/index.php?id=352

Everything looks great! Except the click gesture. Besides warping the LCD (which would admittedly be mounted better in production), it seems like there's an unavoidable amount of strain on both wrists. Still, very cool! It's amazing how many awful interfaces we work with on a daily basis that could use some love like this.

Could this be expanded to smartphones? A pressure sensitive bezel to avoid occluding the screen for simple interactions and eliminating buttons but having regions for input.

Honestly, I've always wanted an unbound (so it's free for apps to use) sensitive strip along one long edge of my smart phone that could be used for jog/seek operations in videos without blocking the screen, as L/R buttons for gaming, etc.

slightly different concept (but too neat to not share):

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pacosal.sw...

praise to sony for supplying an SDK for the Smartwatch platform that enables devs to create their own software!

they also have tools for creating custom firmware. the smartwatch should have the sensors necessary for someone to make this happen (mostly) on existing hardware.

The "click" operation looks clumsy - I'd rather just have some buttons along the edge. But the twist/nudge stuff looks great.

So the whole watch body acts as a nipple mouse... Got it.

It has more degrees of freedom.

Introducing the iPod Watchie

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