Pressure Sensitive Keyboards

Comments on Jill's blog and Brandon's blog

We all use keyboards just about everyday. In fact, I'm even using one now! Over the many years we've used them though, they have kept the same functionality. To type and the occasional keyboard shortcut. This paper discusses making a keyboard with pressure sensitive keys. Instead of having simple contact points underneath the keys like most keyboards, this keyboard uses small domes that are able to detect how much surface area is touching. The harder the keys are pressed, the more surface area is touching.

In gaming this could be used to tell the player's character how fast to run depending on how hard the key is pressed. When typing, pressing the keys harder could increase the size of the font. It could also be used to detect accidental key strokes by filtering out keystrokes that are significantly softer than the rest.

I thought the concept was pretty cool and I won't deny that it definitely has applications. I just don't see this feature catching on very quickly. I might use the feature that changes the font size in a chat application. If I were to work on this project, I would probably try and find some additional and more useful applications for the keyboard.