One of the biggest downsides with a touch interface is that invariably your finger is in the way of the thing you are trying to click on. That is fine for web browsing on your smartphone, but for anything more complicated it can be a pain. The Moky bluetooth keyboard is looking to fix. It features infrared tracker above it, letting you make gesture controlled sweeps and taps.
Designed for users of smartphones, tablets and those with terrible laptop touchpads, the Moky is a product that’s currently being crowd funded via the Indiegogo platform and it’s blown well past its goal. Its a combination of control systems that should allow for a more compact, but versatile, usage experience.
The keyboard itself uses pantograph, scissor style switches with a rubber dome sensor and communicates with your device over Bluetooth 4.0 LTE. While the typing interface is unlikely to woo lovers of mechanical boards, the mid-air gesture and ‘touch’ controls are a little more impressive.
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Picked up using the IR laser sensor, your mid-air fingers can drag a mouse pointer around, tap to click, and activate multi-touch scroll or pinch-to-zoom.
Apple smartphone and tablet owners do lose out as there are no plans for an iOS release as this time, but the Moky keyboard will support the Android, Windows and Mac operating systems. When released, it will come in two color variants, Moky Orange and Moky Blue, and the slated release date is October this year.
While there is some risk associated with every crowd funding campaign, the fact that the designers have a working prototype and have filed for a surprisingly long list of patents, suggests that the chance of the product arriving at some point is quite high.
