Creating Text Out of Thin Air

New means of interaction with data

Creating Text Out of Thin Air

By IEEE Spectrum

Researchers at China's Zhejiang University have developed and tested a smartwatch application in which users write text in mid-air with a finger, and the text is captured by the app.

"The goal of AirText is to infer the texts written by the fingertip in the air, using only the IMU (inertial measurement unit) readings, for example the accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometer, from the smartwatch on the wrist as input," said Zhejiang's Wei Dong.

The researchers' Leap Motion program fed wrist- and hand-motion data to an artificial intelligence model to correlate wrist and fingertip movements in spelling out letters

Volunteers used AirText to realize an average typing speed of 8.1 words per minute, and an average word error rate of between 3.6% and 11.2%.   .... ' 

From IEEE Spectrum