Toward Designing a New Virtual Keyboard When All Finger Movements Are Known

Compared with the physical QWERTY keyboards, the virtual keyboards are slow, inaccurate, and inconvenient because they simply imitate the traditional QWERTY keyboard. To improve the virtual keyboards, we focus on two observations. First, all alphabetic keys are already allocated to each finger of skilled typists. Second, non-touching fingers move in correlation with a touching finger because of the intrinsic structure of the human hand. Based on the first observation, we suggested a new virtual keyboard that restricts each finger to enter the pre-allocated keys only. Then, we statistically proved the second observation in our experiment. Through this experiment, we found the significant correlations between a touching and some of the other non-touching fingers. Finally, we discussed how these correlations can help to improve the performance of the virtual keyboards.