Valve’s new onscreen “Lotus” keyboard for gamepad text input
Jason Schreier, reporting for Kotaku:
Already this gives you instant access to every character in a way that a virtual QWERTY keyboard can't. And the cool thing about this lotus is that it's not awful. In fact, it's actually kind of great. It's intuitive and quick. Seconds after picking up the controller and playing around with the interface, I was writing sentences at a solid, if not perfect pace. It can't quite match a physical keyboard, but it's better than any other virtual typing I've ever tried. A Valve team member proudly noted that when people have tested it out, “they're almost instantly faster than [when using] QWERTY.”
While the big news is that Valve has added a mode to its Steam software distribution platform designed for a “10-foot experience” on a television, I'm most eager to dink around with their new Lotus text input, which combines selection from an analog thumbstick and four front-face buttons.