The new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar? Microsoft was working on it last century

By Darren Allan

So last week we saw Apple unveil the refreshed MacBook Pro range with the headline feature being the new Touch Bar, but rival Microsoft was working on the idea of context-sensitive keys during the last century – albeit only just.

As The Verge spotted, back in 1999 Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group was working on ‘adaptive hardware‘ and produced a concept keyboard that “displays the active action keys and hides the irrelevant keys for a given application”.

In other words, the idea was to intelligently switch keys depending on the app being used, and what the user was doing in that app, a la Apple’s new Touch Bar.

After the initial concept was played around with some 17 years ago, various prototypes were worked on through the course of the 2000s, including morphing LED keys, and using a camera and projector system to project different types of key.

And then in 2009, Microsoft produced an ‘adaptive keyboard’ which featured a “touch-sensitive display strip” along the top – far larger than the OLED strip on the new MacBook Pro – and in this case, the display continued underneath the keys, so the entire keyboard was dynamic (a bit like Apple’s …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components