Keyboards come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from the hulking and noisy mechanical keyboards, to the more diminutive chiclet laptop keyboards, to virtual keyboards that we use on our phones. All of them have different uses and different feels, but could there be another type of keyboard we could be looking at?
Well according to a startup company from Austin, Texas, the answer is yes, and that is to create a keyboardless keyboard. Basically the idea, as you can see in the image above, relies on an invisible keyboard, thus allowing the user to type on pretty much any surface that they want.
We’ve actually seen devices like this before where a virtual keyboard is projected onto the surface, but in this case, there is absolutely nothing, other than a pair of cuffs that somehow will be able to know what you are typing and translate that into text that you can actually use to write emails, send messages, compose documents, and so on.
Of course we expect that there will be some getting used to, but as it stands, the device – called the AirType, is currently in its prototype phase, meaning that we have no idea when it will actually be made a reality. Its creators claim to be in the early stages of development, so it could be a while before we can see it become available commercially, but what say you?