Cirque and ART Will Co-market Touchpad Input Solutions That Recognizes Handwriting in Auto Applications

ATLANTA, Ga. and SALT LAKE CITY, Utah - ART Advanced Recognition Technologies and Cirque Corporation have signed an agreement to provide touchpad solutions that can be embedded in an automobile dashboard or console. This technology will provide the driver with a simple method of character input with the tip of a finger. The project will bring together Cirque's GlidePoint touchpad technology and ART's simpliWrite® handwriting recognizer.

Cirque's single-chip GlidePoint technology tracks finger motion at any speed. It uses a two-layer grid of electrodes connected to a custom chip or ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit). As the user passes a finger over the grid, the capacitance between the electrodes changes, causing the computer to follow the motion of the finger. The sensor can be exposed to the environment or embedded within the dash materials.

The simpliWrite software engine is a character recognizer designed for recognition of each character with minimal writing-area requirements. Users do not need to learn a special set of characters because the simpliWrite software recognizes uppercase and lowercase letters and supports rapid writing.