With the launch of its Xynergi digital production center, Fairlight is also offering a new transformational keyboard technology. The new keyboard technology can change contextually on-the-fly and allows users to implement elegant, cascading submenu trees and animated status indicators, and enables icon-driven menus on its keys.
The Fairlight keyboard is currently shipping as a component of the Fairlight Xynergi media production center, which includes a hardware acceleration engine and professional-grade audio mixing and editing software.
According to Fairlight CEO John Lancken, the new key switch technology advances interaction between people and media by guiding the next step in menu-driven applications. This is achieved with transforming keys using icons or any of 600 available Microsoft fonts.
“The keyboard switching technology eliminates an entire series of synapses that would otherwise be required to navigate from inspiration to execution,” Lancken says. “Beyond digital audio and video, there are tremendous applications for these switches in industrial computing, distance learning, technology training, traditional teaching, trading desk, network operation, quick-service restaurants, retail and wherever people and information co-exist.”
The controller can support any type of language or icon-driven menu structure with a QWERTY keyboard for routine naming tasks and immediate access to MS Office tools such as e-mail, Word and Excel. The controller also features eight touch-sensitive rotary controllers and multiple soft keys arranged around a color control zone known as the “pad.”
The patent pending design allows full color video displays to be accommodated within a mechanical key switch. The switch has the same size and similar mechanical feel to those found in computer QWERTY keyboards. Other shapes and sizes may be developed in the future for different applications, but in the present, the technology is regarded as having the potential to spawn a new generation of computer input devices.
Fairlight believes that QWERTY keyboards composed of picture keys could be manufactured in volume and sold at an attractive price to high-end PC users including gamers, software developers and gadget enthusiasts. The company adds that application developers could simplify their user interfaces by showing layouts of Ctrl and Shift commands.
For more information, visit www.fairlightau.com.
