One of the most attractive innovations at the User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) conference, to be held in October 2009, is expected to be the all new Pressure Sensitive Keyboard designed and developed by Microsoft Hardware. This amazing new invention is going to see the light of day at the maiden Student Innovation Contest that is going to be organized in Victoria, Canada. The device is capable of sensing upto 8-bit pressure throughout the keyboard.

The pressure applied by a user is determined by the touch sensitive sensors embedded across the keyboard, thus responding to each and every stroke, depending upon the intensity of the stroke. Such as a feather touch on the ‘Backspace’ key will omit a single character, a more heightened touch can delete and entire word and a high pressure touch might lead to the deletion of an entire sentence or a paragraph. With this innovative keyboard, the use of ‘Shift’ key to make a character Capital might also be history, as a high pressure touch on any letter, would come up as a Capital letter.

As of now, the pressure sensitive keyboard is only in the prototype phase and Microsoft has no intentions of launching the product for mass usage. The Student Innovation Contest is going to prove to be a great platform for third-party testing of the device. Participants will be asked to come with new interactive programs for the pressure sensitive keyboard. The contestants with the most amount of votes will be awarded $2,000 in cash prizes, judged on the programs’ effectiveness, implementation and the creativity.

Here is a video of the Microsoft Hardware Pressure Sensitive Keyboard:

Via ArsTechnica.