Try Out SwiftKey’s Motion-Controlled “Tilt” Keyboard

On today of all days, it can be a little hard to know what’s real and what’s not. Some of the stories you’ll read today are clearly jokes (though not on a respectable site like this one, of course), while others skate the line between fake and real. Those can be the most interesting ones, and one that really caught our eye comes from SwiftKey, announcing the arrival of SwiftKey Tilt.

SwiftKey’s quite tongue-in-cheek about the new “feature”, where you tilt your phone to manipulate a little pinball bouncing around the on-screen keyboard. By directing its path over the letters you hope to type, you’re able to enter text.

While the accompanying video quickly devolves into farce, this is a very real feature which you can try out yourself. The trick to using it is to start up SwiftKey 4, enter the word “tilt”, and then press and hold on the word to bring up the option to enter SwiftKey Tilt.

Now, it’s borderline unusable as an actually keyboard, but it’s fun to see just how far SwiftKey is willing to go with its joke. The thing is, other companies are seriously considering this kind of idea, and Minuum, the linear keyboard we reported on a few weeks back, has ideas for motion-based text entry for devices lacking touchscreens.