One of my coworkers pointed me to this post at The Astonishing Tribe. Patrick Baudisch at Microsoft Research built a prototype hand held touch screen that allows you to touch the back of the device and see what your fingers are doing on the screen. Not only is it a natural way to hold a device, but it also eliminates the problem of blocking what you are touching with your fingers. I was amused by the virtual keyboard layout – a standard QWERTY transposed so that your fingers press the keys they are supposed to. The QWERTY layout is notoriously inefficient because it was originally designed to keep manual typewriters from jamming. Hopefully the design team will come up with a more efficient alternate layout!
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