Imagine performing simple gestures, like scrolling or zooming in, without moving your hands away from the keyboard. An upcoming gaming keyboard lets you do just that, thanks to touchpad-like gestures in a unique place: the spacebar.
The spacebar has a huge surface area, leaving room for all sorts of gestures. Gaming peripheral company Tt eSPORTS, a brand owned by ThermalTake, is hoping this idea will help sell the Poseidon Z Touch, a mechanical gaming keyboard with blue LED backlighting and programmable gestures, TechReport says.
Five different zones on the keyboard be programmed to launch macros when tapped, according to the official press release, and the entire spacebar can be used for gestures that include horizontal and vertical scrolling or zooming in and out. Another gesture can bring up right-click menus. This gives you some of the useful gestures of a laptop touchpad to your gaming keyboard, meaning you get some touchpad features without using extra space.
It’s an interesting idea. Most typists have two thumbs sitting on the spacebar at all times, so it’s not hard to imagine doing things like scrolling just by moving thumbs across the surface. It might be tricky at first to use the taps without actually pressing space, but we imagine users could get the hang of it.
The keyboard comes with blue backlighting with adjustable brightness, though notably there is no RGB support: just the one color. There’s also anti-ghosting and USB N-Key rollover, meaning whatever keys you press will be precisely the keys that your computer is aware of regardless of how many keys you press at a time.
The mechanical switches on the keyboard come with a five-year warranty, which is generous for any bit of consumer technology. Then again, we are talking about a $110 keyboard, so warranties should probably last.
We haven’t handled this keyboard ourselves, and don’t know how much multitouch gestures on the spacebar add to the gaming experience. But given how reaching for the mouse can take up valuable seconds, we’re curious to imagine how gamers might program such a keyboard to behave.
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