From smart light dimmers to the IPOD: Text-input with circular gestures on wheel-controlled devices

A uni-stroke text input strategy for wheel input controls is proposed, such as the wheel controls found on the 5th generation ipod multimedia devices. The popularity of the ipod indicates that the wheel input paradigm is intuitive and usable. The proposed uni-strokes are based on circular motions that follow the contour of the wheel. Spatial mnemonics based on the shape of the alphabetic characters are used to minimize the time and effort learning the uni-strokes. An approximate distance based method is used for robust character recognition of uni-stroke patterns.