British student creates cool iPhone keyboard with piece of paper

With the help of a piece of paper, the iPhone’s built in accelerometer and some nifty computer software, this student created a ‘virtual’ iPhone keyboard…

The one thing that really lets the iPhone down, or any smart phone for that matter, is the inability to use the QWERTY properly. The keys are always too small and we all know by now that you can only trust AutoCorrect to a certain extent. Well, not anymore.

Florian Kraeutli, a computer science student over in the UK, figured out a way to use a ‘virtual QWERTY keyboard’ to help tackle the problem of tiny unusable keys.

Basically, the iPhone’s built in accelerometer would track the amount of vibrations felt when Kraeutli hit a certain key on his virtual keyboard, which was initially a piece of paper. He then programmed those vibrations to correspond with a particular letter on the keyboard.

The only problem now is that Kraeutli’s keyboard is right about 80 per cent of the time and he says that won’t get better until Apple come up with a more advanced accelerometer.

Now there’s a challenge (or possible lawsuit) if ever we’ve heard one. Watch the video below to see the keyboard in action.

Vibrative Virtual Keyboard from Florian Kräutli on Vimeo.