Demo: A paper keyboard for mobile devices

A well-known bottleneck of contemporary mobile devices is the inefficient and error-prone touchscreen keyboard. We have developed UbiK, an alternative portable text-entry method that allows user to type on a piece of paper, placed on solid surfaces like wood desktop. UbiK leverages the microphones on a mobile device to accurately localize the keystrokes through fine-grained acoustic fingerprinting. We have implemented UbiK as an Android application. Our experiments demonstrate that UbiK is able to achieve above 95% of localization accuracy. In this demonstration, we will show how Ubik works with an external paper keyboard (Figure 1) for a smartphone and a 7-inch tablet. User participation will be welcome in this live demo.