Development of Virtual Dynamic Keyboard Based on the Typing Behaviors on Mobile Devices

Using soft keyboard is the main text entry method on mobile devices. However, texting on small mobile devices, such as smartphones remains challenging and inconvenient. It’s because of the small size of keys, the difference between view angle and touch point, the tilt of the device etc. When entering text, the human eye conducted visual search for the target key, then casted their attention on the character of the key. Moreover, when using one-hand posture to tap targets or enter texts, in order to reach the target key, user usually tilted their device to reach targets. Although there were previous studies found the way to improve the performance of soft keyboard, most of them focused on the text entry methods and didn’t discussed about “the character positions of the key” and “the tilt of the devices”. Therefore, in this research, we would like to understand how the touch point would be affected by “the character positions on the key” and “the tilt of the device”. A game involving tapping task will be programmed in this research, which can collect and record the tapping information when the subjects play, such as the tapped keys, coordinate of touch points, tilt angle of the device, words per minute (WPM), error rate, etc. We will conduct four interrelated experiments in this research:1. to explore relation between “the character positions of the key” and “the touch points”2. to survey the situation of tilting mobile device3. to explore the relation between “the tilt of the device” and ”the touch offset ”,4. to explore the effects of “the character positions of the key” and “the oblique of the device” to “the touch offset”.Through those experiments the relation between “the character positions of the key”, “the tilt of the device” and“ the touch points” could be comprehensively discussed. Finally, we would be based on the research results to develop a soft keyboard, which can be applied to mobile devices and improve the text entry performance on the mobile devices.