I don’t like using the word awesome much, especially not in headlines, but sometimes, the situation warrants it. Florian Krautli’s ingenious usage of the iPhone’s accelerometer sensor isn’t just, well, clever, it’s also all kinds of awesome.
To rewind things slightly, here’s how it all went down. According to iOS Docs, student Florian Krautli made use of the iPhone’s accelerometer sensor to “measure the amplitude of tiny vibrations that emerge when a person is ‘typing’ on a hard surface.” In other words, it’s kind of like the laser-projected keyboards we’ve been swooning over for the last decade or so, only with less pewpew.
Currently still more a proof of concept than anything else, the project, which has been dubbed Vibrative, was developed with the assistance of a jailbroken iPhone. There’s one flaw with the idea, currently. The application is “dependent on very specific patterns unique for each surface”, something that makes it mandatory for the software to take time to learn new surfaces — an issue, if what you’re looking for is speed and efficiency.
Still, with approximately 80 percent accuracy, it’s still an exciting prospect to consider. A future festooned with $0.99 virtual keyboards? I am good with this. What about you?
