Microsoft users may soon see themselves communicating to a keyboard that interprets basic hand gestures, as the company revealed at a conference in Toronto that it was able to developed one.
The prototype keyboard, seen to bridge the gap between the conventional input methods and the touch devices, was introduced at the Computer Human Interaction conference. Keyboards are said to have remained considerably stuck till now to the conventional input method, while touchscreens are now controlled by gestures as well for tasks such as pulling up and down screen menus or flicking through images.
"We present a new type of augmented mechanical keyboard, sensing rich and expressive motion gestures performed both on and directly above the device. A low-resolution matrix of infrared (IR) proximity sensors is interspersed with the keys of a regular mechanical keyboard. This results in coarse but high frame-rate motion data," writes Microsoft Research.
According to senior research engineer Stuart Taylor of Microsoft, the main purpose is to allow users to keep their hands on or very close to the keyboard as they type and make use of input gestures.
Titled Type-Hover-Swipe in 96 Bytes, the projects aims to include motion controls to desktop personal computers, without the need to move the hand of the user far from the keyboard.
The said keyboard boasts of 64 sensors that can detect hand movements when these brush or pass over the keyboard's top surface. The sensors are said to be in pairs. One sensor emits the infrared light, while the other sensor reads the light that is reflected back.
The new keyboard can understand a number of hand gestures, but a few only worked during the conference. For example, swipe the hand over the right or left side, and the right and left side menus in Windows up would show up. Meanwhile, some gestures also substitute present keyboard shortcuts such as the combination of Alt and Tab to switch between applications. Taylor, however, says the prototype keyboard is not here to replace a mouse.
"What we've found is that for some of the more complicated keyboard shortcut combinations, performing gestures seems to be a lot less overhead for the user," Taylor says.
The research team took around a year and a half to work on the project and would continue to polish the gesture interpretation. There's no word yet as to when does the company plan to sell it in the market because the prototype is still a research project. Regardless, when the keyboard is finally polished and ready for commercialization, it will give Microsoft a lift in the now-tight computing industry, research says.
