Here’s the final of our three papers at the MobileHCI 2013 conference. This was a particularly fun project, spearheaded by my colleague Wolf Kienzle, looking at a clever way to do handwriting input on a touchscreen using just your finger.
In general I’m a fan of using an actual stylus for handwriting, but in the context of mobile there are many “micro” note-taking tasks, akin to scrawling a note to yourself on a post-it, that wouldn’t justify unsheathing a pen even if your device had one.
The very cool thing about this approach is that it allows you to enter overlapping multi-stroke characters using the whole screen, and without resorting to something like Palm’s old Graffiti writing or full-on handwriting recognition.
The interface also incorporates some nice fluid gestures for entering spaces between words, backspacing to delete previous strokes, or transitioning to a freeform drawing mode for inserting little sketches or smiley-faces into your instant messages, as seen above.
This paper also had the distinction of receiving an Honorable Mention Award for best paper at MobileHCI 2013. We’re glad the review committee liked our paper and saw its contributions as noteworthy, as it were (pun definitely intended).
Kienzle, W., Hinckley, K., Writing Handwritten Messages on a Small Touchscreen. In ACM 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, (MobileHCI 2013), Munich, Germany, Aug. 27-30, 2013, pp. 179-182. Honorable Mention Award (Awarded to top 5% of all papers). [PDF] [video MP4] [Watch on YouTube – coming soon.]
The Past and Present Future 