What Is The Future of Input Devices?

Say Bye To Your Keyboard — The Next Wave Is Coming

Written Courtesy of Deep Bhattacharyya — Notes form FIT 3175 at Monash University — Week 10

What input devices do you currently use?

If you’re anything like me, you’re typing code on the keyboard while switching through your hundreds of open stack overflow tabs using the mouse and eagerly shoving boiling coffee down your throat using a despicable me coffee mug while telling your google home to shut up, “I’ll get to the gym tomorrow”.

Rest assured, the coffee mug is not an input device, although its real value is probably more than six times the other input devices we’re about to discuss…combined. That leaves us with just:

Your Keyboard

Hopefully not a coffee stained mess, the keyboard is the device that suffers the most abuse over its long winded career filled with slavery and physical destruction.You see initially we had the QWERTY keyboard, which, believe it or not, were used to make typing harder so the typewriter wouldn’t jam!

Other forms of keyboards include:

• Braille — blind people
• Ergonomic — for those who suffer from RSI
• Dvorak — supposed to be faster than qwerty
• Other language keyboards
• Mechanical keyboards — tactile touch of keys

We also have Smartphone keyboards such as:

• Morse code *Actually Exists* to reduce number of keys
• Small physical keys
• Dictionary recognition

Your Mouse or Touchscreen

There are two ways which we point, either with our finger or with a hand. Here is where we have been so far with pointing devices:

Direct: allows user to directly modify screen (eg. touchscreen)

• Light pen — only work on CRT (like a stylus)
• Stylus — hand obscures screen; stylus gets misplaced
• Touchscreens — lots of errors/mistouches; smoudges

Indirect: uses a translation (eg. Mouse)

• Touchpads
• Joysticks: gaming

The New Tech, Coming Very Soon

Ready to replace that dust filled keyboard and the stinky mouse? Here’s whats coming up:

Voice recognition

Voice is much more intuitive than typing. It can be used by disabled or people who are driving. Right now, though, there is a substantial trade off between speed and accuracy.

Haptic feedback

Ever tried a wii-mote? Haptic feedback makes us more immersed in a virtual world. Currently applications for this are limited to game controllers and err…vibrators?

Anyway, stay tuned, because as haptic feedback can imitate different surfaces, textures and can manipulate your brain, it will get some very interesting and unique applications.

Data gloves/Gestures

Kinect, Leap Motion and HTC Vive Controller use gestures to help the user interact with the virtual world on screen, or in VR. It is amazing that computers can recognise common human gestures and translate them into the game world.

VR

Virtual reality is one of the most talked about ways to provide input. It includes free movement using sensors on headsets and motion controllers. There is also the possibilities of six degrees of freedom, since cameras can be introduced into the environment, allowing the subject’s position within the room to be tracked as well.

Other Upcoming Inputs

• Fingerprint/iris recognition: mostly used for login
• Handwriting recognition: Uses ML models to recognise patterns

Upcoming Outputs

In addition to inputs, there are also many new ways that computers are using to output data, rather than using an old fashioned screens. Remember when control rooms used to look like this?

The LEDs/Dials of yesterday were proceeded by graphical GUI wizardry, but alas times have changed yet again.

Audio is being considered by the mass media as a viable alternative to video. Due to its non-obtrusive nature, users can listen anywhere they like and get the information they need fast and accurately. Devices such as echo and Google Home have combined killer voice recognition with voices to make extraordinary progress in this regard. It is so amazing because it drastically reduces need for a screen.

However, intonation contours still continue to be a problem for audio output systems. This means that computers don’t know what words in a sentence to put emphasis on, leading to misunderstandings and awkward speech synthesis.

How Effective Is My ______

So you want do be the designer of the next revolutionary input device? Fear not, here are some measures to test your new invention!

Fitts Law

Think about a keyboard. The smaller the key is and the further away it is, the harder it is to hit. That’s all that Fitt’s Law is saying, and then quantifying it with some fancy voodoo mathematics.

Look at this formula hard enough (don’t actually do it, it’ll lead to a guaranteed headache, I tried), you’ll realise its missing a crucial component. When you were small, it took you ages to learn the qwerty keyboard. What if the keyboard looked like the alphabet. Would have been a lot easier, right? The formula has no consideration of the time it takes to learn how to use a device.

GOMS

The other way is linked to how we analyse user interfaces. It includes measuring the Goals, Operations, Methods and Selection Rules of the input device to get an overall metric of its effectiveness.

Errors

Its inevitable, people will make errors while using your input device. It is crucial that you measure how many of each of these types of errors are made, so you are able to use techniques to effectively counter them:

• Mistakes —User uses the wrong method to achieve the tasks
• Slips — The method used carried out incorrectly

Conclusion

It is incredibly important to consider the new devices that are coming up with an inquisitive lens. We must use key testing metrics to measure the effectiveness of these new innovations, as otherwise, we might just end up with another QWERTY keyboard, a device made to be difficult to learn, and cumbersome to use.