June 22, 2007: TwoStick game controller text input

This is a video of a pretty cool text input method from the folks at twostick.org, a research collaboration between folks at the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Tampere.

I really love out-of-the-box approaches to UI, and this is a great example. Too many of us that spend our time in Windows UI forget that there are tons of other approaches besides qwerty and pull down menus. Years ago I used to work with a cad system that used piechart menus and also spent some time working with cad systems with digitzing tablet devices rather than mice.

Anyhow, this approach looks really promising for consoles. Would love to see different iterations of it (letters rearranged differently, trigger-to-confirm, shoulder buttons for space/backspace, etc).