A Practical Pressure Sensitive Computer Keyboard

A Practical Pressure Sensitive Computer Keyboard
Paul H. Dietz, Benjamin Eidelson, Jonathan Westhues and Steven Bathiche

The designers built a keyboard with can detect how hard you push the keys. They used several different levels circuits laid out in a grid matrix. By pushing the key down, you completed different circuits, which is how they measured how hard the keys were pressed. This is notable because they keyboard has really not changed much since it was first widely used in the typewriter. In the paper, they describe how similar technology has been used in electronic music keyboards and other methods, however it has not been applied to the standard qwerty keyboard. From the user studies, they reported that many people would be interested in a keyboard which can expand user input.

I think this could be very useful for input other than conventional text from keyboards. The designers mentioned that in gaming that it could control how fast you move. That would be very useful as with conventional keyboards only send a discrete true/false type response. However, I don't see that this would be very useful in just typing/drafting papers. I don't mind holding the shift key to do a capital letter, and in some ways that would be easier in my opinion than pushing the key harder.