The new technology emerging from the functionality of smartphones never ceases to amaze me. My new favorite website, Co.DESIGN, featured a few such gadgets this week that I couldn’t help myself from telling you about.

Keyboard Magic

The first is something called the Vibrative Virtual Keyboard, developed by Florian Kräutli. Your iPhone’s accelerometer measures vibrations on a surface, and Kräutli’s software maps those vibrations to a point of origin on the table. When the phone can “see” where you’re tapping, you can have a QWERTY keyboard on any tabletop – essentially creating a keyboard for your iPhone out of nowhere, anywhere.

By using an iPhone app called SensorMonitor, Kräutli accessed the raw sensor outputs of an iPhone via a network connection. All the user needs to do is train a new surface by tapping a few points and letting the software know what letter those taps are supposed to be, and Kräutli’s software will number-crunch the positions for the rest of the keys. Users can then save this surface so the software won’t need a calibration for it again. According to the article, the measurements still aren’t 100% clear in machine learning, but Kräutli has designed the software around this shortcoming, invisibly autocorrecting typing, much like Apple’s own spell checker fixes mistakes.

Smartphone-Style Photo Nostalgia

Mint Digital, the makers of Olly and Foldable.me, started a campaign for on Kickstarter for Projecteo; their idea to bring Instagram photos to life on your wall. Projecteo is a mini, LED-powered slide projector that displays photos from your Instagram account onto a wall in a 2.5-foot spread.

Projecteo is a small slide film projector that works with Instagram photos by placing them on a single frame of 35mm Kodak film, with nine pictures assembled on each.

The second half of Projecteo will be a streamlined printing service in the cloud where users can submit their Instagram shots to order new slide wheels. The Projecteo itself with one slide will run just $25 to Kickstarer pre-orderers, and the early birds will actually land it $10 cheaper.