Apple Patents a New ‘Fusion’ Keyboard Which Combines Touch-Input and Mechanical Typing

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently granted Apple a new patent for its own keyboard with touch sensors. The hybrid design offers a separate key and touch input which provides users more flexibility while performing multi-gestures without requiring them to move their hands away from the home row.

Named as the "Fusion" keyboard, this new device has been developed by Apple inventors John Elias and Steven Martisauskas. Just like a regular keyboard, Apple's Fusion keyboard features the same mechanical keys but each designed like a smaller version of a track pad with capacitive touch sensors. This allows the keyboard to detect regular swipe and zoom inputs similar to that of a MacBook track pad. Also, it enables multi touch gestures which means that the user can type and control the cursor at the same time.

Unlike the regular keyboard designs, Apple's hybrid keyboard features two-position mechanical switches which perform particular actions based on the levels of pressure. Pressing the first level allows the input of the letter while pressing the same key to the next level generates another command similar to that of a mouse click. In order to identify the two types of presses, Apple has used a time based approach which means that a certain amount of time is required for the type of stroke to be recognized.

Some of these features are already familiar to Apple's new Force Touch technology which was included on the Apple Watch and on the MacBook track pad so it seems quite unlikely for the company to green light its production right now.

Just like Apple's other patents, the Fusion keyboard will surely take a long time before a tangible manifestation is featured in the company's devices but at least it provided us a glimpse of the interesting and innovative concepts that Apple might possibly produce in the future.