Treadmill ink - enabling continuous pen input on small devices

Abstract

This paper presents a novel handwriting input user interface (UI)for small portable devices with a touch-enabled screen. This UI includes a writing area on the screen that behaves as a treadmill such that electronic ink input is immediately moved from right to left while it is being entered, giving the user the feeling of writing text on a virtual ticker-tape. This method allows the user to write continuously without running out of writing space, and takes up very little screen real-estate to implement. The UI communicates with a recognition engine capable of recognizing continuously input handwritten text and that can buffer incomplete ink entries. The UI technique described, unlike prior interfaces in which space constraints limit the ability to continuously write on the device screen and thus slow text input, allows the full throughput benefit of continuous text input to be realized within a very small writing space.