Invisible Keyboard

Daniel Rashid and Noah Smith believe an invisible keyboard could be used to enter text into mobile devices. The Carnegie Mellon University Language Technology Institute researchers are behind the "relative keyboard," a concept that would allow users to type on any touch-sensitive surface. However, users will need to have good touch-typing skills. The relative keyboard relies on software to measure the relative distance between keystrokes as it determines what is being typed, and a dictionary to filter possible strings as it figures out what was meant. In a test involving 10 people typing 160 words on a blank touch screen, some of the participants were not as accurate using the invisible keyboard and some said it was difficult to type without seeing any keys. The researchers believe the concept can work on any surface as long as a device knows where a user's fingers fall.