研究人員研發新式拇指鍵盤 手機打字更高效大綱

來自英國、德國及美國的研究人員共同研發了一款適合雙手拇指同時打字的虛擬鍵盤應用，能夠將平板及智能手機用戶的打字速度從現在的每分鐘20個字提高到每分鐘37個字，而且打字體驗更加舒適自如。參與研發的聖安德魯斯大學一位博士表示，傳統Qwerty鍵盤將用戶侷限在“不夠理想的文字輸入界面”。新鍵盤的研發人員利用計算優化技術設置字母的排序，比如，使用頻率較高的字母集中在鍵盤中區，以期讓用戶在打字時減少拇指移動的時間，從而提高打字速度。我們現在使用的標準鍵盤是以主鍵盤字母區左上角6個字母的連寫Qwerty來命名的，此次新研發的鍵盤則以主鍵盤右下角的四個字母連寫命名爲KALQ。研發人員將於今年5月1日在巴黎召開的美國計算機協會會議上展示該應用，之後該應用將免費供安卓用戶下載使用。

Researchers have created a new keyboard layout which they claim makes "thumb-typing" faster on touchscreen devices such as tablets and large smartphones.

Dr Per Ola Kristensson, from St Andrews University, said traditional Qwerty keyboards had trapped users in "suboptimal text entry interfaces".

The new design has been dubbed KALQ, after the order of keys on one line.

Its creators used "computational optimisation techniques" to identify which gave the best performance.

Researchers at St Andrews, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany and Montana Tech in the US joined together to create the virtual keyboard, which will be available as a free app for Android-based devices.

According to the research team "two-thumb typing is ergonomically very different" from typing on physical Qwerty keyboards, which were developed for typewriters in the late 19th Century.

They claim normal users using a Qwerty keyboard on a touchscreen device were limited to typing at a rate of about 20 words per minute.

This is much slower than the rate for normal physical keyboards on computers.

Researchers said the key to optimising a keyboard for two thumbs was to minimise long typing sequences that only involved a single thumb.

It was also important to place frequently used letter keys centrally close to each other.

Finding the optimal layout involved minimising the moving time of the thumbs and enabling typing on alternating sides of the tablet.

The results were said to be surprising with all the vowels placed in the area assigned to the right thumb, whereas the left thumb is given more keys.

With the help of an error correction algorithm trained users were able to reach 37 words per minute, researchers said.

Dr Kristensson, lecturer in human computer interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, said: "We believe KALQ provides a large enough performance improvement to incentivise users to switch and benefit from faster and more comfortable typing."

The developers will present their work at the CHI 2013 conference (the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) in Paris on 1 May.