There are many keyboards for Android, but most users prefer the one that comes by default on Google Pixel and other mobile phones: GBoard. Google Keyboard not only offers more accurate text prediction, but it also provides access to advanced features such as the ability to automatically scan documents.
But Gboard is more than just a mobile keyboard; It’s also one of the craziest projects to come out of Google, more precisely from its Japanese branch. It has already become a tradition that Google Japan introduces a new keyboard every year, which revolutionizes the way we enter text; or it makes us laugh, one out of two.
The keyboard introduced this year, on the other hand, can give you a headache just looking at it. The photographs accompanying this text have not been modified with Photoshop nor created with Artificial Intelligence, although they may appear so; There really is a keyboard with this “impossible” shapealthough he has an explanation.
This keyboard is inspired by the Möbius groupa mathematical concept that defines a surface with a single face and a single edge; Once you think about it a little, you realize how ridiculous it seems. Any surface we imagine has at least two sides, like a simple sheet of paper; However, in 1858, the mathematicians Johann Benedict Listing and August Ferdinand Möbius each discovered this possibility.
In reality, creating a Möbius strip is relatively simple. Just take a strip of paper, twist one of its ends and glue the two together. The result is a surface that has only one side, and this is something we can check just by placing our finger on it and running across the entire strip; We will reach the same point where we started, by going through both the front and back of the original article (although in this strip these concepts do not exist).
How does this apply to a keyboard? Does this make it easier to use? This is something only the Google engineers who built and tested this strange experiment know. What they revealed is that this keyboard has strange social properties, and that’s it. several people can use it at the same timeby placing yourself at different points on the keyboard. And since it has 208 keys, much more than a traditional keyboard, it would in theory be possible for several people to write on the same document; After all, it has a USB-C connection and is detected by a computer like a normal keyboard.
Obviously, this device will not come to market, and it doesn’t need to. It’s a true rarity, and we don’t say that because of its shape, but because it’s an artifact from a bygone era of Google. This project of the Japanese division was originally born as part of April Fool’s pranksthe Anglo-Saxon version of April Fool’s Day; At the time, all divisions of the company participated with their own projects, such as a Pacman game on Google Maps. But the current Google is no joke, and in 2021 management decided to ban this practice; Somehow, Google Japan has managed to continue creating weird keyboards, even if it’s only October.
