Paper Reading #7- Performance optimizations of virtual keyboards for stroke-based text entry on a touch-based tabletop

Title: Performance optimizations of virtual keyboards for stroke-based text entry on a touch-based tabletop.
Reference Information:
Jochen Rick. "Performance optimizations of virtual keyboards for stroke-based text entry on a touch-based tabletop." UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology ACM. New York, NY, USA. ©2010 ISBN: 978-1-4503-0271-5.
Author Bio:
Jochen Rick- Jeff is a junior faculty member in the new Department of Educational Technology at Saarland University. His primary research interest is how new media can better support collaborative learning. From 2007-10, he was a research fellow at the Open University, working on the ShareIT project. His primary role on the project was as technologist—designing and implementing novel pervasive computing applications. In May 2007, he received a PhD in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology
Summary:

• Hypothesis: "While the stroke-based technique seems promising by itself, significant additional gains can be made by using a more-suitable keyboard layout."
• Methods: In order to achieve a more efficient keyboard layout that is also comfortable for users to use on a tabletop layout, Jochen investigated strokes, natural movement, comfortability, and how to arrange the keyboard. Jochen recruited volunteers to participate in a study in which Jochen studied natural stroking movements.
• Results: Jochen was successfully able to determine natural arm movements, which movements or changes in stroke direction take the longest, and that both right-handed and left-handed users could use the software with ease. But Jochen quickly discovered that finding the optimal layout for keys on the keyboard based on the selection of a "good" lexicon on "modern" language would take a very long time to compute, so he did not have results produced from that.
• Contents: In this paper, Jochen set out to compare traditional keyboard layouts/implementations with a newly-proposed tabletop stroke-style virtual keyboard. Providing a brief history on the productions, reasons, and implementations for different kinds and styles of keyboards, Jochen is not satisfied with any proposed so far to be used on an interactive, table-top environment for different reasons including space conservation and comfortability for users.

Discussion:

I believe that Jochen did an excellent job at highlighting strengths and weaknesses of each specific kind of keyboard proposed throughout all of existence. Even Jochen's proposed virtual keyboard has limitations (see above in results). I never knew that there were that many different kinds of physical and virtual keyboard layouts in widespread use. I spent a decent amount of time looking at them, trying to figure out how I would get used to them and why each one of those designs were created originally. I felt that was interesting. I am not sure if Jochen reached his goals, however. I think Jochen really wanted to come up with a good, efficient design for a keyboard on an interactive table-top, but simply wasn't able to create an ultimate design how he had envisioned. I feel like other researchers could definitely take away some really good ideas and points from his work, but I'm not sure if someone will try to implement a keyboard how he had envisioned.