Microsoft Adaptive Display Keyboard - Now You Can Look At Photos While You Type In True Multitasking Style (Video)

This Adaptive Display Keyboard is only a prototype and won the Unified Structured Inventive Thinking (USIT) Student Innovation Contest. It is said to be an extension to the monitor, with a strip of touchscreen above the keys. The thing is that each individual keys are also displays and can be changed.

Why should you care? Because it is just too cool. Check out the videos after the break to see why you would want one connected to your desktop computer.
The touchscreen above the keys basically act as a platform to launch applications. If I'm not wrong, it can also be used to control opened tabs, acting like a taskbar or something. I'm not too sure about that.

What's cool is really the keys, each keys have displays and are adaptive. For example, if you change the language of the keyboard, the keys will update to show the characters of that language. Also it shows you hot keys, like if you were to hold the Windows key, the pre-defined keys will reflect the actions it will do. For example, the M key will show "minimize all", the "P" key will show "projector", etc.

The keyboard is really just a large screen with buttons. Thus, for customising fanatics like me, images can even be added to the keyboard, functioning somewhat like a "keyboard wallpaper". Now that's interesting!

Of course, like every piece of tech, a video demo is always much more entertaining and informative than a paragraph of technical terms. The first video is a general introduction to what the keyboard can do and the second is a more detailed demo, if you're still interested.



Jump to 1:15 if you feel like skipping what the guy has to say. =P


Source: Engadget, YouTube