Make This: The Digital Thumb-Writer
/This is a repost of something I wrote almost two years ago. It was up for less than a day before I took it down. I took it down because someone expressed a desire to work on this. Since they haven’t yet done anything with the idea, I’m now reposting this so that anyone who wants to take a stab at it can. Apparently it’s much more difficult to do than I imagine it to be. But if someone could figure this out, it could be a very valuable tool for anyone who does app magic.
[Update: I’m now hearing that someone may have cracked the code on this. If so, consider this post a sneak preview of something that may be out in the coming months.]
Here’s an idea for one of you magic app makers out there. It’s an idea I had years ago and I’m surprised nothing similar has come out yet (as far as I know). So I’m putting it out here so that hopefully one of you will take the idea and run with it.
Essentially it’s an idea for an input method, which you could then attach to many different effects.
For example, let’s say we just met and I say, “I get a good vibe from you. I bet we have the same spirit animal. What’s your spirit animal?”
You tell me you don’t have one.
“Of course you do,” I say, “you just haven’t thought about it. Go ahead, take a guess at what yours is.”
You say it’s a duck.
“Bingo,” I say.
And then I show you my phone and my wallpaper is an image of a duck. “I knew we had that in common.”
Or, I show you a picture I’ve taken of a page in my high-school yearbook, zoomed in on the face of one person.
“This is a photo of my girlfriend my freshman year in high school. I got in trouble for carving her initials into my desk. That’s a very strong memory for me, and they say strong memories are the most easily read by others. So I want you to give it a shot. What do you think her initials were?”
You say, “S.R.”
I draw your attention to my phone and tell you to zoom out on the image. When you do, you see that under the photograph is her name: Stephanie Richmond.
So, as the name of this post implies, the idea would be an input system where the phone’s screen works as a pad that you can thumb-write on with your thumb.
You WOULDN’T write the word (or multi-digit number) across the screen in one go. Let me be clear about that. That would be difficult. Instead, you’d do it letter by letter. So if the person says “duck,” you would write a D in the middle of the screen with your thumb (get some sort of vibration saying the letter was recognized), a U, a C, then a K.
(And in the second example you’d just write S then R and the app would load an appropriate name for the person under the image.)
The phone could either look like it was off (as in the first example) or apparently be on a photo or webpage.
The beauty of this method is how disarming it would be. Most input methods for apps require some level of concentration on the phone at some point, but this would require none. Your hand would just be holding your phone down at your side, while you carry on a conversation. It’s very easy to write, letter-by-letter, with your thumb while maintaining your focus on someone else.
The difficult part would be—I assume—to get the handwriting recognition to work behind the scenes. But one thing that would make this much easier (again, I assume) is that it wouldn’t have to recognize words. It would just have to recognize individual letters. Even just individual capital letters.
Being able to input any word, without breaking concentration, and without looking at your phone would be a game changer in the app game. If any of you decide to give this a shot, let me know.