The Microsoft Applied Sciences Group has unveiled a new prototype for its DisplayCover that incorporates a keyboard cover that is equipped with an ‘Embedded Thin-Film Touchscreen Display’.
The DisplayCover has been specifically designed for compact touch enabled laptops providing both the physical keyboard together with a thinfilm e-ink display with a resolution of 1280 x 305 pixels extends the available screen real estate of the slate device by up to 8 percent.
Microsoft opted for the E-Ink display due to the ‘bistable nature of electrophoretic ink’, as well as its ability to reduce the secondary screen’s impact on battery life. Microsoft explains more :
DisplayCover supports dynamic UI manipulation, concurrent access to multiple applications, stylus annotation, gestures and trackpad interactions on the horizontal plane. To illustrate these features, we demonstrated its use in a suite of example applications built around the proposed interaction techniques. DisplayCover extends the available screen real estate of tablet computers while mitigating occlusion issues associated with direct pen and touch input.
Unfortunately no information on pricing or worldwide availability has been released as yet for the DisplayCover by Microsoft, but as soon as information comes to light we will keep you updated as always.
Source: Microsoft
