Apple iPhone turns table top into full-sized invisible keyboard
We have virtual keyboards, clip-on keyboards, magnetic keyboards and even laser keyboards. But what if your keyboard wasn’t a keyboard at all?
Florian Kräutli has developed an ingeniously simple alternative called the Vibrative Virtual Keyboard. By placing an iPhone on any surface, that surface becomes a keyboard. Technically, the phone’s accelerometer is measuring vibrations on that surface. Kräutli’s software maps those vibrations to a point of origin on the table. And when the phone can “see” where you’re tapping, you can have a QWERTY keyboard on any tabletop.
“I wondered how a normal surface might become interactive, without using an elaborate combination of projectors and cameras, as Microsoft is currently doing in their research,” Kräutli explains. “There are already tons of sensors in current smartphones, so I thought there must be more that we can do with them.”
