Contest Winners Show Potential For Pressure-Sensitive Keyboard

Chris Harrison writes "About a month ago, Microsoft sent out prototype pressure sensitive keyboards to 40 international teams. They had four weeks to hack and cobble together some cool ideas. The innovation contest that centered around the keyboards released the winners last night (after a voting period Monday night at the ACM UIST conference). Some pretty neat ideas, ranging from pressure-sensitive password entry (Safelock), magnetic pens for cursor control (Hidden Forces), and even cool climbing (Rock Climbing) and land-deformation games (BallMeR)."

Re:Pressure-Metric Password

[jda104]

Nonetheless, my primary concern would be that it would lock people out of their computers/applications when they have had a little much to drink.

We had a >95% True Positive rate (with a >99% True Negative. I can dig up the ROC curve if you really care...). Basically, the idea is to find and measure typing attributes that are keyboard/mood/alchohol level-agnostic. We're still working on getting funding for testing the algorithm after a few drinks, though.

Re:ugh

[Jarik C-Bol]

woah.You're right. this could be awesome for lots of music editing and synthesizing work.

Re:There are pressure insensitive keyboards?

[tverbeek]

There are people who read /. without sigs disabled?

Re:Pressure-Metric Password

[jda104]

A primitive write-up of the Safelock system is available here [jdadesign.net] - complete with ROC curve and some performance metrics. I've included a little more detail about the four keystroke attributes we measured as well as a surface-level explanation of the algorithm