Keyboards have long been our most common interface; many of us spend hours every day sitting in front of one, and there’s little indication that will change in the future: most alternatives are either unpopular or impractical.
Of course, there are voice activated writing programs, but since we don’t speak in the same way as write, the process of educating ourselves to speak in a way that allows it to become a substitute for efficient typing is one that very few people are willing to go through. As things stand, the keyboard will remain central to using computers, and in the case of this delicious Raspberry Pi model, will even become the computer.
In other words, innovating such a widely used and practical interface is not easy, and even minimal modifications have proved problematic. For example, Apple’s touch bar, the multi-touch OLED strip integrated into the top of the keyboard instead of the function keys, still generates criticism, until through use, its many possibilities become clear. For me, for example, it has become indispensable when making presentations, I can see the thumbnails of my slides, and jump to any of them out of sequence.
Patently Apple, a website about new Apple copyrights, has found a patent, entitled “electronic devices having keys with coherent fiber bundles”, which is basically a reconfigurable keyboard with small screens on each key that can dynamically change, to accommodate a wide range of possibilities such as a change of language to gaming.
Such a keyboard could vastly improve productivity, as well as helping avoid repeating the same mistakes, and would simply require learning some basic steps to configure them.
My spell-chekcer is dribing me carzy!
Previous efforts, such as the Optimus keyboard created by the Art. Lebedev Studio in Russia, and that attracted a lot of interest back in 2005, was very expensive and was withdrawn soon after its launch in 2007. There have been other attempts based on similar concepts, but they failed to gain much traction. As things stand, Apple’s idea looks to be the biggest innovation applied to the keyboard in a long time.
That said, just because it’s applied for a patent doesn’t mean the company is working on it or is planning a launch any time soon: for the moment, we remain in the realm of hypotheses, and we will likely be there for quite some time.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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