Beyond the Touchpad: Microsoft Hoping to Bring Gestures to Our Keyboards

This sounds intriguing: Microsoft is working on ways to integrate a trackpad with a keyboard.  I know that my desk sees its fair share of clutter, and one less device certainly could free up some real estate for me – to add more clutter.  A research paper published recently reveals that the Redmond company has a prototype of a device which combines an Apple (what?) keyboard with clusters of infrared proximity sensors that are mounted just above the key caps – this means that there are no external sensors required.  The end result  is somewhat like Leap Motion combined with a keyboard.  This keyboard supports gestures like swipe and pinch to zoom to navigate through documents.

In this age of touchscreens, everything is becoming gesture-friendly, and with that brings a whole new level of interaction with PCs.   At this time this device is simply in the research phase, but personally I think it has a lot of promise.  I don’t see a device like this replacing a mouse , but rather act as a supplement to it – just think how much better productivity could be if while you are typing, to navigate pages your hands would not have to leave the keyboard area?

What do you think – the next big thing, or just another gimmick?