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Minuum
Minuum is bringing its compact keyboard to your face. The app’s developers have announced support for Google Glass — and a few other wearable devices — in a proof-of-concept video. It promises to make typing on devices with no discernable keypad fast and (more importantly) intuitive.
I like Minuum — I said as much in my review . It’s a clever app that crams a full-fledged keyboard into tiny spaces and doesn’t sacrifice accuracy or speed. But our phone displays have proven to be big enough for our needs, and for better or worse, they’re only getting larger. As it stands, the screen real estate that this compact keyboard saves generally isn’t worth the hiccups involved in relying on autocorrect algorithms and predictive text — even if they are plenty precise.
Wearables are a different story altogether.
Minuum claims that this is the very first keyboard for Google Glass. The proof-of-concept video shows how the sensors built into Google Glass could accommodate the keyboard’s gesture-driven interface, with only a minimal amount of silly head waggling. Towards the end of the video, we also get a glimpse of how the keyboard would function on a wearable-tech ring, with eye tracking, or by simply projecting letters onto a surface like your arm.
And the accessibility potential goes beyond being too lazy to reach for your phone. If one of your hands is impaired or otherwise unable, a text-based messaging system that revolved around Google Glass could prove to be an optimal way of communicating, especially if you’d rather not speak every word of a private conversation aloud.
