Minuum is a small linear keyboard for smartphones that aims to free up screen space and enable faster more accurate typing. The developer, Whirlscape Inc., a Canadian start-up have launched and Indigogo campaign to fund an Android keyboard app, plus with an iOS keyboard for developers to put into their apps. It seems like a great idea, I hope they can pull it off.

Minuum’s auto-correction algorithm corrects very imprecise typing. Based on touchscreen and wearable device research of researcher Will Walmsley and associate professor Khai Truong from the University of Toronto, the algorithm configures the difference between what you type and what you mean, in real time, even if you miss every single letter. Per the FAQ on website,

Every time you tap on the keyboard, your device remembers a couple of letters to the left and right of each touch and compares the possible combinations of letters that you typed against a dictionary. The closer each touch is to the actual letter you meant to type, the more likely your intended word will be found. In general, you can consistently hit letters a couple of places to the left or right of the letter you actually wanted to type, and Minuum will still figure out what you wanted to say.

“While our mobile devices are becoming smarter and faster, the keyboard has coasted into the 21st century essentially unchanged from the days of the typewriter; now we’re stuck with keyboards that cover up half a smartphone screen but don’t make up in accuracy what they take up in screen space,” says Whirlscape’s Walmsley. “Realizing we could minimize the keyboard while maintaining accuracy was the eureka moment. We’ve changed what a keyboard needs to be, enabling a future of typing with wearable technology.”

The company boasts that Minuum recovers more than half of the usable touchscreen space lost when typing on traditional virtual keyboards . It provides letter magnification for precise typing, which is particularly useful for large fingers .While respecting user familiarity with QWERTY keyboards, it allows handy access to everything needed in a keyboard, like punctuation, space, backspace, and enter functions, without hogging screen space. With this keyboard you can even move it around your touchscreen where you want it.

The Minuum keyboard is called “one-dimensional” since it presents a continuum of letters, laid out in a row. Its simplicity and size accuracy make Minuum an ideal fit for future wearable computing devices. Although the first implementation of this technology is for smartphones and tablets, its type-anywhere implications are far-reaching.

Whirlscape is aiming to raise $10,000 on Indiegogo from March 18 to April 17, 2013. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-minuum-keyboard-project?website_name=minuum