The gesture keyboard consists of a graphics tablet with an electronic pen or stylus to capture digital ink and a software layer to recognize the shapes. The layout has base characters laid out and the user writes the modifier (matra) on the base consonant cell using the pen.
It took a year for HP Labs in India to develop the handwriting recognition technology for the keyboard and it has a patent for the character positioning and gestures.
HP claims the keyboard will help address the problem of poor PC and computer literacy among non-English speaking people in developing countries.
It takes just 10 to 15 minutes for a Hindi speaker to get to grips with this gesture keyboard, which was officially launched last month. HP licenses it to a third party and it costs around $50.
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