d-Board
A novel text input method for game controllers.
On-screen keyboards are a painful way to enter text with a game controller. The d-board was designed from first principles as an alternative. The name combines “d-pad” and “keyboard”.
The cursor is the interface: you move up and down to pick the next character and right to enter it, with every control overlaid on the cursor, so you never have to look away from the text you’re writing. Underneath is an adaptive predictive text model that suggests whole word sequences, not just single words, and learns your vocabulary as you type.
I first built it on the PlayStation 3 and pitched it to Sony in 2007, then reimplemented it in 2010. The PS4’s game store now uses a similar interface when you search by name.