Friday, August 7, 2009

How Would YOU Use This? Microsoft Developing Pressure Keyboard With 256 Levels Of Sensitivity (Oh, And Win Stuff)

microsoftpressurekeyboardBy David Ponce

Lots of interesting stuff at SIGGRAPH this year. In this case, there’s a contest sponsored by ACM SIGCHI and ACM SIGGRAPH centered around a keyboard Microsoft Hardware is developing where each key is capable of detecting pressure in 8-bit resolution. In other words, in 256 levels of sensitivity. Current suggested uses for this are to selectively capitalize letters based on how hard a key is pressed, or deleting an entire word as opposed to a single letter, again, based on pressure.

Of course, these are early ideas and the whole point of the contest is to actually find out what to do with something like this. There are three categories: most useful, best implementation, most creative. Each one carries a “$2000 prize, bragging rights, and special consideration for a spot at SIGGRAPH 2010’s Emerging Technology (E-Tech) demos.”

So, you can head over to the site (check links at the bottom of article). Or if you’re too lazy to bother entering, why not give us your ideas right here in the comments… so we can steal them.

[ Contest Page ] VIA [ Electronista ]




  • BrandonJ
    I'd use it in florida voting. The pressure used would be the digital hanging chad punch. Did they really mean to select it?
  • Grangoire
    Could we do away with Capslock key then?
    Please?
  • hgregory
    We could really have a Back-TAB. Like, when filling in forms, you press TAB twice, then you either have to press TAB a hundred times to skip all the other fields and start from the beginning; or you have to reach for the mouse. How stupid is that!!!

    My suggestion: if I hit TAB really hard, it should go backwards.

    (Also, they could use it for user identification as every person has a different pattern of typing.)
  • Or, you could just hit Shift+Tab...
  • hgregory
    Oh, man, U totally changed my life :D
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