A Voyage of the Virtual World (Part 1): Virtual Keyboards

A Voyage of the Virtual World, A section I am devoting to the hats-off innovative techniques & devices which are not only providing best solutions to present day e-scenarios but also opening new realms in innovations, exploring new future-tech possibilities & prophetic visions. As the result of Virtual touch layer and Projection technologies, the Virtual Keyboard is the live example of the human imaginations realizing to truth.

Virtual Keyboards(also known as onscreen keyboard, soft keyboard, virtual laser keyboard (The VKB), projection keyboard) software and/or hardware component combination, with the primary purpose to provide full QWERTY keyboard functionalities virtually to the user like entering characters & keystrokes. They can be projected and touched on any surface. The keyboard watches your fingers move and translates that action into keystrokes in the device. Most systems can also function as a virtual mouse. Each time touching the image on the surface of a key generates a unique electronic signal corresponding to a key's image. Virtual keyboards are also used as features of emulation software for systems that have fewer buttons than a computer keyboard would have.

Virtual keyboards are also compatible with many Smartphones and PDAs & are replacing the millions of foldout keyboards sold for Palm and other handhelds in the smart cellular phone market.

With a large number of applications including projection notepads that track any pen, pencil or pen-like object; gestural interfaces for devices with inconvenient or ultra-small form-factors or locations (ie-wearable computers); and user identification and authentication through facial recognition, sight-enabled applications in consumer games, premise security, automobiles, military-aerospace, and medical applications. Using these virtual facilities the chance of breakage and infection transfer is reduced. Additionally virtual keyboards require no cleaning and they have no wires, buttons, or switches. All mechanical input units can be replaced by such virtual devices, optimized for the current application and for the user's physiology maintaining speed, simplicity and unambiguity of manual data input.

















Senseboard Technologies (http://www.senseboard.com) further extending the capabilities by providing the technology. The user can type on a hard surface like a desk or table, or into the air. The hand-mounts measure finger mtwo hand-mounted devices that connect to the target computing device with the help of Bluetooth wireless networkingovements and tell the handheld what keys the user intends to press, based on the ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard layout. There's also a pause function to capture the motion of the fingers and hands, enabling keyboard functionality.

Kitty (http://www.kittytech.com), a finger mounted keyboard for data entry into PDA's, Pocket PC's and Wearable Computers. KITTY, an acronym for Keyboard-Independent Touch-TYping, is a fingermounted keyboard that uses touch-typing as the method of data entry. The device targets the portable computing market and in particular wearable computing systems, which are in the need of a silent, "invisible" data entry system based on touch-typing. The new device combines the idea of a finger-mounted chording device (such as the "Twiddler" by the HandKey Corp.), with the advantages of a system that uses touch-typing (such as the Virtual Keyboard by Senseboard or the Scurry by Samsung)

References:
Canesta(http://www.canesta.com)
Developer VKB Inc (http://www.vkb.co.il/)
Virtual Devices(http://www.virtualdevices.net/)

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