Computer Engineering Commons^™

Using Triz To Design The Future Keyboard, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

A keyboard is the most common and widely used input device for a computer. Using the keyboard is often vital to interact with a computer. There are several aspects of a keyboard such as size, key layout, convenience and ergonomic features etc., which are continuously under improvement by keyboard designers and manufacturers. TRIZ is an efficient methodology in product designing. Using IFR and Trends we can well predict the directions of the future keyboards and using Contradictions and Principles we can overcome the current limitations. This article analyses the critical features of a keyboard, does a functional analysis, derives the …

Inventions On Drag And Drop In Gui, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Drag and drop operation is one of the key capabilities of any Graphical User Interface. The user can do quite complex operations simply by visually dragging and dropping objects from one location to another. It saves user from remembering and typing a lot of commands. The result of a drag and drop operation may vary depending the type of source object and type of destination object. For example dragging a file and dropping on a folder may copy or move the file to the destination folder, dropping that file to a remote ftp location may upload that file using internet, …

Inventions On Using Sound And Speech In Gui, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Voice recognition facilitates a human interaction with the machine. VR may be used to replace the manual task of pushing buttons on a wireless telephone keypad. This is particularly useful when the hands of the user are busy with other activities like driving a car.

However, the VRS system has several limitations. The VRS requires lot of training and customization in order to be effectively used by individual users as each individual falls into different voice patterns. Besides the voice interface is complex and is not as reliable as the keyboard or mouse. This article illustrates some interesting inventions on …

Inventions On Gui For Eye Cursor Controls Systems, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Operating a GUI through eyeball is a complex mechanism and not used as often as mouse or trackball. But there are situations where eye-mouse devices can play a tremendous role especially where the hands of the user are not available or busy to perform other activities. The difficulties of implementing an eye-cursor control system are many. The article illustrates some inventions on eye-cursor control system, which attempt to eliminate the difficulties of the prior art mechanisms.

Keyboards For Inputting Japanese Language: A Study Based On Us Patents, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

The most commonly used Japanese alphabets are Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. The Kanji alphabet includes pictographs or ideographic characters that were adopted from the Chinese alphabet. Hiragana is used to spell words of Japanese origin, while Katakana is used to spell words of western or other foreign origin.

Two methods are commonly used to input Japanese to the computer. One, the “kana input method” that uses a keyboard having 46 Japanese iroha (or kana) letter keys. The other method is “Roma-ji input method”, where the Japanese letters are composed of English input from a standard QWERTY keyboard. Both the methods …

10 Inventions On Reducing Keyboard Size, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

A conventional computer keyboard consists of as many as 101 keys. The keyboard has several sections, such as text entry section, navigation section, and numeric keypad etc. and each having several keys on the keyboard. The size of the keyboard is a major inconvenience for portable computers, as they cannot be carried easily. Thus there are certain circumstances which compels to reduce the size of a keyboard. Reducing the size of a keyboard leads to several problems. A reduced size keyboard may not contain all the keys available on a full size keyboard; a reduced size keyboard may not be …

10 Inventions On Keyboard Attachments: A Triz Based Analysis, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Although the primary objective of the keyboard to input data into the computer, the advanced keyboards keep various other things in mind, such as, how to use the same keyboard for various other purposes, or how to use the same keyboard efficiently by using various other attachments to the keyboard. This objective led to various inventions on keyboard attachments, some of which are illustrated below in this article. This article illustrates 10 inventions on various keyboard attachments from US patent database. Each different attachment improves the usability of the keyboard in some way or other. Some attachments illustrated are template …