Alternative machine-interfaces

EN: If you sitting in front of a computer keyboard and mouse usually are the interfaces to communicate with the machine. On mobile phones and PDAs the data input it is more tricky. A recent Google Tech Talk shows a cool solution: Dasher. It is hard to describe the interface, but it feels like browsing through the text you want to enter. It has a probabilistic language model under the hood to make this possible. With this Java applet you can test the concept without installing Dasher locally.

Chinese and other languages with many symbols are supported, too. For disabled people Dasher can be a good solution for communicating.

Although the basic implementation is already some years old, there are new features to add. The video shows how to control it just with head, eyeball or breathing muscles movements. As the Wii seems to inspire cell phone producers to build in senors for motion and rotation the tilting of a handheld device could be used to control Dasher.

Some link I wanted to post already for a while and that fit into that topic: Liquid browsing for displaying and browsing multiparametric data and Octomatics, a very intuitive way of displaying numbers and calculating with them.