Contest Winners Show Potential For Pressure-Sensitive Keyboard

Chris Harrison writes "About a month ago, Microsoft sent out prototype pressure sensitive keyboards to 40 international teams. They had four weeks to hack and cobble together some cool ideas. The innovation contest that centered around the keyboards released the winners last night (after a voting period Monday night at the ACM UIST conference). Some pretty neat ideas, ranging from pressure-sensitive password entry (Safelock), magnetic pens for cursor control (Hidden Forces), and even cool climbing (Rock Climbing) and land-deformation games (BallMeR)."

Comments

There are pressure insensitive keyboards?

[John Hasler]

Every keyboard I've ever used did something when I pressed on it. Except the broken ones.

Re:There are pressure insensitive keyboards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a quartre. Buy yourself a dictionary.

Re:There are pressure insensitive keyboards?

[agnosticnixie]

Here's a diem, seize it.

Finally!

[Rah'Dick]

Finally a keyboard that recognizes when I slam my fist into it! Make that a keybinding for "stop whatever the fuck you're doing and respond already".

Re:Finally!

[somersault]

The most useful initial application for me would be to simulate a shift keypress when you press a little harder than everyday typing pressure.

Could be amusing for automatically writing in caps when you get ANGRY, and handy for running in oldskool FPS games that don't support the full analog range of the buttons - which could be easily supported right now in any game that already supports analog games controllers.

Very Impressed

[Chelmet]

I like this, and see pressure sensitive keyboards being predominant in the not too distant future, based primarily upon the supplemental embedded video at the bottom of the linked page. All of the proposed uses, from deleting word at a time, to recognising typos, to movement in games, I can't see any argument against. Its just a genuinely innovative device. A lot of the competition entries are rather useless as they stand, but go a long way to show the potential of the platform. One problem I've always had with PC gaming is not being able to play driving games properly without a controller, as on/off left/right is useless. I suppose this would solve that problem, as I'd now have an analogue keyboard. As to the typing/password recognition, of course it would have teething problems en route to full user acceptance, but all of the criticism levelled so far is easily surmountable. Someone loses a hand, or their typing changes - easy! As per online banking and whatnot, the user can answer a few predefined questions (independent of typing style) and reset the memory. A brute force attack could be prevented by limiting the number of attempts. Okay, so a couple of problems would always be present, such as typing with a coffee in hand or logging in to your girlfriends facebook, but overall I am thrilled by the idea, enough to make my second /. post ever, and am very much looking forward to owning one, providing they don't come with optimus maximus pricetags.

Re:Pressure-Metric Password

[jda104]

Nonetheless, my primary concern would be that it would lock people out of their computers/applications when they have had a little much to drink.

We had a >95% True Positive rate (with a >99% True Negative. I can dig up the ROC curve if you really care...). Basically, the idea is to find and measure typing attributes that are keyboard/mood/alchohol level-agnostic. We're still working on getting funding for testing the algorithm after a few drinks, though.