Cord input is an innovative yet highly researched input method. The paper that I read was presented in CHI 2010 and was titled "Cord Input: An Intuitive, High-Accuracy, Multi-Degree-of-Freedom Input Method for Mobile Devices". The problem that was being addressed was the stagnation of innovation in input methods for mobile devices and the suitability of a cord as an input device. The idea presented was that since a cord has many affordances that advocate its use as an input device, this area needs further exploration. Three students from Carnegie Mellon looked into this problem and found out that a cord has an affordance to be pulled, twisted and pressed in different spots. All of these physical interactions, they devised, could be used to input data.
They developed a cord that could be used in such a fashion, which has sensors attached to it that could detect when someone pulled on the cord, when someone twisted the cord and when someone touched the cord in certain spots. All this data was processed by a computer and then presented to a program as input. Two test cases were devised for each physical interaction. One consisted of a user solely using a particular physical interaction such as PULL to navigate to the option they wanted to choose and then pressing the space bar on a computer to select that particular option. The second test used two physical interactions such as Pull+Twist so that the user pulled the cord to navigate to an option and then twisted the cord to select that particular interaction.
From their results it is clear that Pull+Twist was the least successful input method whereas the other two had equal success rates. A user survey was conducted after the two tests and the users responded that using Twist solely was the easiest and most helpful. A constraint on this input method that I can see is that the user is constricted to choosing from a 1-D list and cannot make selections or navigate in 2-D without using all three Pull+Twist+Touch together.
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