Jacob Hall, Editor-in-Chief of TapSauce | APPS | 11.14.2012 @ 12:00 pm
Before the iPhone 5 was announced, the internet was full of all kinds of insane rumors about new features. Some were pretty reasonable and turned out to be accurate predictions (larger screen, fifth row of apps, etc) and some were like visions straight out of a sci-fi movie. My personal favorite of these rumors was the rumor that the iPhone 5 would project a little keyboard onto a flat surface, letting you type on your iPhone using the equivalent of a full keyboard. Of course, that turned out to be bogus, but a new in-the-works app suggests that this kind of feature may be on the way sooner than you’d think.
Right now, it’s called the “Vibrative Virtual Keyboard,’ but it will undoubtedly have a snappier name when someone buys it for untold millions in the near future. When activated, your smartphone’s accelerometer will sense nearby vibrations and translate them into text on the screen. Lay down a piece of paper with a QWERTY keyboard printed on it and you’ll see exactly which area of vibration translates to which letters. To get a look at the app in action, check out the video embedded at the bottom of this post. Look on in awe!
As cool as this is, I can’t say I’m completely sold on tech like this replacing keyboards. As someone who writes for a living, I can’t even imagine doing all of my writing on a tablet, much less a keyboard that doesn’t actually exist. Heck, when I sampled Microsoft’s Surface tablet, I couldn’t even abide its keyboard cover since typing with no physical feedback was proving unwieldy. This kind of technology will be in our phones and tablets very soon and it will be ideal for writing longer emails at lunch, but I’ll keep my physical keyboard, thank you very much.
Keyboard snobbery aside: this is really, really cool.
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