A Japanese inventor creates a projection mapping-enabled keyboard with letters that fly out into space as you type.

2016 is shaping up to be a great year for projection technology, what with these life-sized holograms close to becoming commercial products and this touchscreen projector turning even your grandfather’s shiny bald head into your own personal command center in the near future. At this rate we’ll all be living in Blade Runner by — ballpark guess — April, 2016, but before that, we’ll introduce you to one more amazing piece of projector-based technology with this neat keyboard (which will seem quaint and old-timey when we’re all dealing with Replicants a month from now, but still).

Tsubasa Yumura is a true jack of all trades. An entrepreneur, designer, creator and technologist, he’s created numerous inventions both novel and potentially disruptive. Sure, this keyboard would probably fall into the novelty category, but boy is it cool. As video shows, Yumura has rigged a light-up keyboard with a projector to make the letters in the keys you press appear to “fly” up and away from the key, almost like you’re playing some kind of reverse typing rhythm game.

Specifications on the rig are not entirely clear at first glance, and there’s also no word on how far the keys appear to fly, or whether or not you can aim the keyboard at your dog and “shoot” letters at him for fun. There are also no details on whether Yumura plans to make the keyboard commercially available, although the invention was recently featured on Japanese TV’s popular morning news and variety show, Toku dane!, so we imagine demand is plenty high.

Source: My Game News Flash

Image and video: Tsubasa Yumura via Twitter