Apple recently patented their take on the glass piezoelectric keyboard concept such as the Kong Fanwen “No-Key” design announced months earlier.

Where this will go remains to be seen, but rather than a clear sheet of glass, Apple’s patent indicates an LED backlit device with LCD “screens” under a stamped or formed hard touch-sensitive surface.  Keys will be positioned and marked as they are on a conventional keyboard allowing for touch typing, but a haptic feedback method like the vibration-on-click method that many cellular devices currently use will indicate key presses rather than any direct key motion.

It is a curious concept that will of course split the computing community.  Long-experienced typists likely will not like the immovable keys, but the ability to press a key and completely change the presented language on the keyboard would be amazing; or imagine setting a device such as this with profiles for your on-line games: there would be no more fumbling for the right key combination to launch a task, as it could be mapped to a single key press. Read on…

This isn’t even in the design phase yet, but Apple has shown that while they can’t dominate the PC market, they sure can influence it, and this is a product I think I would very much like to get my fingers on.  Considering that we have been using essentially the same technology for our keyboards for 50 years, it’s about time companies started looking at the future.

Source: Patently Apple