Evolution of Symbol Encoding
Technology
What is so special about glancing? Let’s see it in historical perspective.
First, there were broken twigs, arranged stones, sand marks communicating and preserving information of early humans. Then came marks scraped on tree trunks and stone walls. Those were followed by primitive paintings of animal and human figurines. With time those paintings became less realistic and more symbolic. That was the dawn of writing. The procedure was slow, marginaly informative and required a lot of physical effort. That physical aspect of information transfer remains true even today.
Writing was, and still is all about moving our hands and fingers to produce permanent symbolic traces on various plain surfaces.
The typewriter, invented more than 150 years ago, mechanized and sped up the process. Hand, and specifically finger motion, no longer reproduced the shape of the symbols. Encoding became spatial/positional. Movements used to shape written symbols were replaced by stereotyped motions toward the keys. With machine mechanism generating the actual symbols, speed and quality of records improved.
The computer keyboard, a direct descendant of the venerable typewriter keyboard, improved significantly on the formation and handling of symbols. The ergonomics and the basic performance speed, however, only changed marginally.
Need for better data input brought about numerous attempts at improving the symbol-encoding interface. While writing is one-handed, typing was, in affect, a regression, making text generation a two-handed operation. Recent developments are directed toward eliminating the need for two-handed data entry. These new designs, so called chording keyboards, use fingers of one hand to operate on a small number of keys, while still retaining the capacity to generate a complete set of characters of the alphabet. Such result was made possible by using combined synchronous finger presses, similar to chords being played on a piano. Operating a one-handed device comes with additional advantages: previously used extensive two-handed motions were replaced by short range punches, and to operate chording keyboards the visual control became neither possible nor necessary. However, chording motions are not neuro-bio-mechanically natural, making them cumbersome and inefficient, and adversely affecting their popularity.
Finally, along comes a new twist in the way we communicate with the machines - gesturing. Gestures presently used in several commercial implementations are hand motions against the touch pad, performed with one or both hands and/or with differently configured fingers. This method is generally unsuited for encoding letters of the alphabet, and such devices play only supportive role to keyboards. Such gestures are related if not derived from gestures of the sign language, which, incidentally, have also been attempted to be electronically harvested for communicative purposes.
Glancing Pad is the first in an entirely new direction: eliminating the keys altogether. It uses tiny stereotyped motions performed as finger-sweeps over and onto the detector pad. The encoding rule is simple: each finger of a hand is assigned a different set of eight symbols, and invokes these symbols by performing one of eight simple movements (glances). Encoding is not spatial/positional because there are no keys. Instead, it relies on the extreme dexterity of the hand to easily produce distinctly patterned 2-D movements.
In essence, Glancing Pad is a form of scribbling with the fingertips.
Symbol Encoding Apparatus and Method, United States Patent No.: 7,038,659