Force touch gesture based interaction for virtual keyboards.

With extreme popularity of touch screen mobile devices, the demand for effective one-handed text-entry on virtual keyboards is continually growing. To increase text-entry speed and decrease error rate, this thesis proposes force touch gesture based suggestion selection for virtual keyboards and analyzes the performance compared to standard keying and swyping keyboards. The prototype, called OctoType, was built for iOS smartphones to take advantage of the 3D-touch technology by implementing an interaction based on OctoPocus, a dynamic gesture guide. Two users studies were conducted to evaluate performance of OctoType. The results showed that OctoType outperforms standard keying keyboards by 13.1% in terms of text-entry speed. Moreover, OctoType registered force touch gestures with an accuracy of greater than 97%. Given these advantages of force touch gesture based interaction, this thesis also introduces the framework, called Gesturizer, that provides a conflict-free gesture interaction with arbitrary shapes to iOS applications running on devices with 3D-touch.