A friend of mine passed me a link to a rather cool device…

No words can adequately describe quite how breathtakingly cool this i.Tech Virtual Keyboard is. Bluetooth enabled, it uses infrared to project a clear and crisp keyboard onto your desktop, and then transfers your keystrokes via wireless networking to your PDA, Pocket PC or smart phone – it sounds far too futuristic to be true. But it’s very much for real, and it’s awesome.

This 22nd Century gadget is about half the size of your average deck of cards, sits wirelessly on any flat surface, and projects a red standard QWERTY-layout keyboard on any flat opaque surface. Using detection technology it “watches” your fingers hit the key locations it has projected, and then sends the keystrokes through to your PDA, smart phone or pocket PC via Bluetooth.

The projected keyboard is highly visible even in strong light (though it does of course look spectacularly cool in the dark). It’s highly portable as well, though it will make you look a bit of a lunatic at the local, as you will look like you’re typing on nothing more than the pub table (which also raises some serious health and safety concerns), and you will of course be interrupted every fourteen seconds with someone coming over and wanting to know where they can get one.

There is no cooler keyboard in the known universe.

Check it out here.

If it had the option of being powered by USB and allowed you to alter the mapping a bit (to include/exclude/rearrange keys), I’d buy it in a heartbeat.