[vimeo] http://vimeo.com/49780741 [/ vimeo]
This year several news stations picked up the concept of a holographic keyboard and said it would be implemented in iPhone 5, but everyone knew that this was nonsense. It is far from stupid a designed system by a Swiss designer, the system allowing us to write on iPhone without using the virtual keyboard. The Swiss offers us an invisible virtual keyboard that works on the basis of vibrations and with the help of the iPhone's accelerometer that recognizes those vibrations.
But Florian Kräutli claims to have gone one step further by creating the Vibrative Virtual Keyboard: it uses the accelerometer in an iPhone 4 to sense tiny tremors from fingers hitting a table, and works out which "key" is being pressed, so once installed on a device it can turn any surface into a keyboard, in theory. The vibration-sensing keyboard has to be trained before it can be used, and much of the practicality of the technique will depend on how often that training has to be repeated.
Basically, he designed the layout of an invisible keyboard that is recognized by his system, and when the user generates a vibration at a certain point near the iPhone, the system interprets that vibration as pressing a key. Vibrating Virtual Keyboard is the name of this virtual keyboard, it is far from being a viable option for replacing virtual keyboards in mobile terminals, but as an idea it is extremely interesting.
