HP comes up with path-breaking innovation in keyboard technology

Bangalore, Mar 15 (UNI) HP today announced a revolutionary pen-based technology that could revolutionise communication in Indian Scripts, besides benefitting more than 1.5 billion non-English speaking people.

Announcing the new innovation at a press conference here, Mr Dick Lampman, HP Senior Vice President for Research and Director of HP Labs, said ''the Gesture-based keyboard (GKB) can help bridge the digital divide by simplifying the use of Information Technology'' Developed by the HP Labs India, the device was expected to be manufactured and distributed by a third party based on technology licensed from HP.

Mr Lampman said the new technology could potentially open up the power of computiong to vast numbers of new users, all in their own language and without prior knowledge of English or typing.

The technology held potential for Indic languages derived from the Devanagari and Tamil scripts and helped non-English speaking people, including Indians, Nepalese, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis and other phonetic script users, he added.

Unlike other prevailing Indic language entry methods, which either used bilingual key boards or displayed the Indic keyboard layout on a monitor, the HP GKB was a low cost and rugged solution that helped solve the phonetic language entry problem by allowing users to input data using a pen. This simple intuitive data entry method could make it easier to communicate for people who did not understand English.

HP Labs India researchers had conducted field tests and demonstrated that most people found the GKB easy to use.

Mr Lampman said ''HP Labs India is working on a wide range of other new information and communication technologies for India and other rapidly growing markets by understanding relevant social, cultural, economic and technological drivers.'' In addition to text, GKB could also be used as a mouse, allowing capture of signatures, pictures and other visual elements. This feature held the potential application of creating and storing notes and images in any language as bitmaps.

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