MagBoard: Magnetic-based Ubiquitous Homomorphic Off-the-shelf Keyboard

TL;DR

MagBoard is a magnetic-based, customizable, and accurate virtual keyboard system for mobile devices that leverages the phone's magnetometer to localize magnets on printed keyboards, enabling flexible and robust input methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel homomorphic keyboard approach using magnetometers for accurate magnet localization on printed keyboards, adaptable to various devices and environmental conditions.

Findings

Achieves over 91% key detection accuracy for 2cm*2cm keys.

Reaches 100% accuracy for 4cm*4cm keys.

Robust performance across different phones and magnets.

Abstract

One of the main methods for interacting with mobile devices today is the error-prone and inflexible touch-screen keyboard. This paper proposes MagBoard: a homomorphic ubiquitous keyboard for mobile devices. MagBoard allows application developers and users to design and print different custom keyboards for the same applications to fit different user's needs. The core idea is to leverage the triaxial magnetometer embedded in standard mobile phones to accurately localize the location of a magnet on a virtual grid superimposed on the printed keyboard. This is achieved through a once in a lifetime fingerprint. MagBoard also provides a number of modules that allow it to cope with background magnetic noise, heterogeneous devices, different magnet shapes, sizes, and strengths, as well as changes in magnet polarity. Our implementation of MagBoard on Android phones with extensive evaluation in different scenarios demonstrates that it can achieve a key detection accuracy of more than 91% for keys as small as 2cm*2cm, reaching 100% for 4cm*4cm keys. This accuracy is robust with different phones and magnets, highlighting MagBoard promise as a homomorphic ubiquitous keyboard for mobile devices.