Title: Adaptive Keyboard (2010)
By: Microsoft
Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/content/projects/uist.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/content/projects/AdaptiveHardware.aspx
All the microsoft research projects
Image: on my Flickr

Concept:
A keyboard with dynamic keys, changing of appearance and function (not necessary letters)
Description:
What’s an Adaptive Keyboard? It is a research prototype developed by Microsoft Hardware to explore how combining display and input capabilities in a keyboard can allow users to be more productive. The keyboard incorporates a large, touch-sensitive display strip at the top. In addition, the display continues underneath the keys, allowing the legends to be modified in real time. This lets you do things like change the character set to a different language or display command icons.

Opinion:
A very interesting prototype to make keyboards a new nonverbal tool of communication with other symbols than letters without to change the traditional context of use of the keyboard device

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojusRO38Tdc]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0MEhKk9xg4]

Title: E, U, And Their Inner Life (2009)
By: Gerard Rallo
Link: http://www.ideesabsurdes.net/wordpress/?p=420
Image: on my flickr

Concept:
Based on real neural networks, E and U, are two electronic monkey toys designed solely to find inner neural happiness.
Description:
To achieve such a goal, they perceive their environment (their owner, and their partner) and themselves. Depending on their own personality they balance the importance of each entity depending on the happiness they bring to them, they modify their inner structure in order to adapt themselves to their perceptions, and at the same time, modify the way their environment interacts with them.
As a result of this chaotic system, we can find and interpret infinite behaviors and relationships; stable, with ups and downs, unstable, uni and bidirectional dependency, independence, bullying, chronic depression,…

All their interactions and states are offered up for people interpretation, represented in a barely decipherable pattern on the LED panels on their chests.

Opinion:
We will notice here the system of representation of the little monkey toys emotions, an abstract modulation of a LED matrix. The interpretation is leaved to the observer / user and might significate something or become interpretable with the time. In the other hand there is a main design problem in the appearance of those monkeys. Their face is represented as smiling (without any interaction with it) then it influence the way we interprete the LED matrix. The LEDs should represent an emotional state for those monkey therefore either LEDs should be placed on the face or the monkey should have no facial expression – as it is our main emotional expressive output.

Title: Pressure sensitive keyboard prototype (2009)
By: Microsoft
Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/content/projects/PressureSensitiveKB.aspx
http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2009/call/contest.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10304792-1.html
All the Microsoft research projects
Image: on my flickr

Description:
Microsoft demonstrates a gaming demo and typographic demo. Changing font size of text on-the-fly as you increase typing pressure. It also shows off accelerated backspacing (deleting words at a time, instead of letters, as force increases), and posits that it might even be able to minimize typos by gauging whether you used sufficient force on a key to suggest intent.
Concept:
Finger pressure sensed by the keyboard

Opinion:
This Microsoft prototype is inspiring about the hardware possibility and the software potential behind it. A sensitive keyboard could influence typography as in Benjamin Gomez’s project. But crossed with time data it could also reflect an overall intensity through variations in tangible finger input. The visual translation of it could be something else than typography: layout, colors, any non verbal complement of information reflecting the user state of mind…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDI8eYIASf0]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG3RHC8ianc]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80FWh_fQ_Zg]

Opinion:
The overall concept of this project is a bit more complex than what is described above. I extracted from it only what interests me that is, it’s typographic approach.
Here typographic parameters are modulated by the way of using the keyboard, but what I see is that in an everyday use of that kind of tools, user’s mood – that influence his physical behavior – would naturally react with the message he writes and characterize it visually. It means that typography – which already graphically translate a chosen intention in a message – could be auto-generated by the natural, usual use of the keyboard. Typography would become – a bit more than it already is – a non verbal complement of information to the message possibly associable to the mood, emotion or at least intention of the writer.