Microsoft’s Infrared Keyboard Gives Gesture Control To An Average PC

Microsoft’s Infrared Keyboard Gives Gesture Control To An Average PC

Your laptop’s trackpad gestures are great, but they make your desktop computer’s keyboard-and-mouse combo feel old-fashioned. Microsoft’s prototype keyboard changes that, cramming infrared sensors between the keys to allow hand gesture control without ever leaving the home keys.

The 64 infrared proximity sensors powering the prototype keyboard have a very low resolution, but with a super-fast refresh rate of 300Hz, they can track rapid hand movement without difficulty. As seen in the video above, the keyboard (which looks like an Apple, rather than Microsoft product) recognises swipe-to-scroll, pinch-to-zoom, and gestures to switch between programs.

Microsoft’s Infrared Keyboard Gives Gesture Control To An Average PC

The research project, “Type-Hover-Swipe in 96 Bytes“, was presented at this week’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Toronto. While Microsoft doesn’t indicate any concrete plans for production, it definitely looks more practical than Leap Motion, which seemed super-cool, but ended up being kind of clunky in real-world use. In the future, your keyboard will be your mouse. [Microsoft Research via The Verge]

Picture: Andrew Liszewski, YouTube, Microsoft Research


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