Microsoft is a software company that allows itself to flirt a tad with hardware design and manufacturing. However, the Redmond giant is limited for the most part at producing hardware peripherals, and is best known for its collections of mouse and keyboard devices. At the very same time, the software giant is making consistent forays into the future input models, namely natural user interfaces, to deliver a new level of interactivity between humans and technology. In this regard, a combination between traditional input devices and next generation natural user interfaces is cooking over in Redmond, having already produced a prototype, namely the UnMousePad.

"Ilya Rosenberg and Ken Perlin present the UnMousePad, a paper thin, flexible multi-touch device about [the] size of a mouse pad. The UnMousePad not only continuously detects a multitude of touches, it also senses varying levels of pressure at a resolution high enough to distinguish multiple fingertips and even the tip of a pen or pencil. Because of its form-factor, it can be used for simple mouse input, for multi-touch gestures, or for a wide variety of interactive applications, such as games, 3D sculpting, 6DOF object manipulation, musical instruments, and interactive control of synthesized human voice," reads an excerpt from the UnMousePad's description posted as a part of the presentations from Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2008 DemoFest.

As you can see from the video embedded at the bottom of this article (via Gizmodo), the mouse is no more, and all the focus is now on the mouse pad which can detect touch and gestures. The UnMousePad is nothing more than a prototype of Microsoft Research for now, but the product shows great potential for commercialization, especially with Windows 7 coming up.

Microsoft has had to artificially add multi-touch, gesture and object recognition capabilities into Windows Vista, as it places the operating system at the core of its surface computing product. But the same is not valid for Windows 7. The next iteration of the Windows client, and Vista's successor, will sport multi-touch and gesture recognition technology by default, and the UnMousePad seems nothing more than a natural fit for the operating system. Undoubtedly, the UnMousePad seems tailored to the new natural user interface of Windows 7.