Mannerisms

Sharp has produced a display capable of acting as a keyboard for a laptop computer. What, one wonders, would such a laptop computer look like?

Sharp revealed the existence of this display last week. Asked if the company was using the display to make a keyboardless laptop, Dr Mike Brownlow, director of the systems displays group at Sharp “I can’t say that. I can only say that it’s possible to use the display in that way.”

The virtual keyboard is nothing new. The iPhone has one. When delivered by superior sensor technology it is thoroughly acceptable. The Sharp display has an integrated light sensor in each pixel.

But the point about a laptop is that you need to see the screen while you’re typing. So would a keyboardless laptop have a single display split between keyboard functions and display functions?

Or would it use another Sharp innovation, the double view display, which superimposes a parallax barrier on an ordinary LCD, enabling light from the backlight to be sent in different directions to show different visual content on the same screen depending on the angle of view?

Look at it from the left and it’s a keyboard, look from the right and it’s displaying whatever your key-stroke has called up.

That would be a heck of a thing.