TwoStick: a New Way to Type

Do you hate those on-screen keyboards you have to use to type in consoles as much as I do? Then you may be interested in a new project coming from a collaboration between researchers at the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Tampere called TwoStick:

“TwoStick is a novel text entry method for game controllers. The design is based on the review of previous work and several rounds of pilot testing. We compared user performance with TwoStick experimentally to a selection keyboard which is the de facto standard of game controller text entry. Eight participants completed 20 fifteen-minute sessions with both text entry methods. Soon TwoStick outperformed the selection keyboard and was faster in the end. Qualitative results indicated that TwoStick was more fun and easier to use than the selection keyboard.”

Not sure how this could be incorporated into a game exactly, but it’s still an interesting new way to type on a console. Below is a video showing the system in action.