UTEST graduate Whirlscape, makers of the wearable, one-line Minuum keyboard, were recently featured on CBC’s Lang and O’Leary Exchange.

Minuum has also broken the 100 billion pixels mark in screen space saved for its users. Read about it on input, the Minuum blog.

Founder and CEO Will Walmsley was interviewed by Amanda Lang. The footage was also made available on CBC News, and was included in CBC’s weekly summary of the week’s top business stories. Watch the video.

Here’s an excerpt:

Typing on a smartphone is hard enough – imagine doing it on a smartwatch or other wearable device.

A Toronto startup called Minuum is trying to solve that problem with a tiny virtual keyboard.

It’s a downloadable app costing $3.99 that combines a tiny keyboard with a powerful autocorrect that helps you get the message out, no matter how you punch it.

[. . .]

“What really drives us to work on this technology is the future potential it has. The core concept is a keyboard that is just one line of characters, which means if you can imagine typing on a line anywhere, that can be a keyboard,” he said.

Walmsley is just 24 and started developing keyboard alternatives for his masters degree in engineering physics and engineering psychology at University of Toronto.

His team at Minuum is developing keyboards that responds to movementsof the head, wrist or eyes, even one that senses typing motion on a separate surface. The key is the autocorrect algorithm which can adapt no matter how strangely you type.

It’s a market with huge potential, Walmsley said.

“If you look towards wearable devices like a smartwatch or Google glass or whatever else the future has in store, it’s really all about typing using any kind of sensor,” he said.

The full article is available on CBC’s website.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, director of marketing and communications.