Grid-Keyboard Keycaps With Asymmetric Tactile Features
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Solution Overview
Problem
Medium-sized devices, such as netbooks, face challenges in providing usefully-sized and positioned keys for touch typing while maintaining an evenly-spaced grid pattern, which conflicts with traditional offset-pattern keyboard muscle memory.
Innovation Solution
Implementing bilaterally-nonsymmetrical tactile features on keycaps that match standard touch-typing finger positions, allowing for an evenly-spaced grid pattern while accommodating muscle memory of touch typists, potentially through indented or differently textured surfaces, and using a consistent keycap form factor with rotational variations.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Area of stationary object
If an evenly-spaced grid pattern is used for keyboard keys, then the keyboard can be made smaller and more space-efficient, but it conflicts with traditional offset-pattern muscle memory and reduces touch typing comfort
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies local quality by adding asymmetric tactile features (such as raised bumps or indented areas) to specific keycaps at positions that correspond to traditional offset-pattern keyboard layouts. This allows the overall grid pattern to remain space-efficient while local modifications preserve the familiar tactile cues for touch typists, resolving the conflict between compact size and typing comfort.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces asymmetry into otherwise symmetric grid-pattern keycaps by positioning tactile features asymmetrically on specific keys. This creates distinctive tactile signatures that match traditional offset-pattern muscle memory, allowing users to locate keys by touch without visual confirmation while maintaining the space-saving grid layout.
2Ease of operation
If traditional offset-pattern keyboard layout is used, then touch typing muscle memory is preserved, but the keyboard cannot be made as compact as grid-pattern keyboards
Solution Approach 1:
The patent modifies specific keycaps locally by adding asymmetric tactile features at positions that correspond to traditional offset-pattern layouts. This allows the keyboard to maintain a compact grid overall while preserving familiar tactile cues at critical key positions, enabling touch typists to use muscle memory effectively in a smaller form factor.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent merges two previously conflicting keyboard layout concepts—the space-efficient grid pattern and the touch-typing-friendly offset pattern—by combining the grid's overall structure with offset-style tactile features on individual keycaps. This hybrid approach achieves both compact size and touch typing comfort simultaneously.
3Adaptability or versatility
If different keycap designs are used to accommodate both grid and offset patterns, then versatility is improved, but manufacturing complexity and cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses asymmetric tactile features on keycaps that can be rotated to different orientations. This allows a single keycap design to serve multiple positions on the keyboard by simply rotating it, eliminating the need for multiple specialized keycap variants and simplifying manufacturing while maintaining versatility.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent designs keycaps with rotational symmetry or interchangeable orientations, allowing the same keycap form factor to be used in multiple positions and configurations. This universal design approach maintains adaptability to different layout requirements while reducing the total number of unique keycap designs needed, thereby lowering manufacturing complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A keyboard can be comprised of a plurality of alphabetic keys that are disposed in an evenly-spaced grid pattern with respect to one another. In any event, these keys have keycaps configured to comport with touch typing as with a keyboard having a plurality of alphabetic keys that are disposed in an offset pattern (such as the classic QWERTY offset-pattern typewriter-styled keyboard). By one approach, these keycaps can have keycaps having bilaterally-nonsymmetrical tactile features that at least substantially match standard touch-typing finger positions. By one approach these tactile features can comprise an indentation. If desired, these keycaps can share a same form factor. In such a case, some of the keycaps for the alphabetic keys can be disposed on the keyboard at a 180 degree rotation as compared to others of the alphabetic character keycaps.