Sensel Morph: Keyboards have had their day
Video producers have different needs than journalists. That's why one company has invented an input device that covers all special use cases. The Sensel Morph impresses at first glance.
There are few hype products that are as obviously great as the Sensel Morph. Yet the item doesn't look all that spectacular. But after a few seconds, it was clear to video producer Stephanie Tresch that she wouldn't be leaving the Sensel start-up's stand without a Morph in her rucksack.
The reason lies in front of her on the demo table. A rectangle with rounded corners, connected to a PC via USB cable. The top of the rectangle is metallic silver, the bottom black rubberised. The Sensel Morph.
The keyboard you can build yourself
"Musicians are our main target group," says Mark Rosenberg, head of marketing at the company.
Of course, because the Morph can be just about anything, but you have to teach it. You can divide the black surface of the device into individual areas via software and assign functions to these areas. If a layout is then accepted by the Morph Community and it is used widely enough, the people at Sensel will consider printing an overlay for the Morph.
An overlay is essentially a kind of keyboard that places buttons where the control surfaces are defined on the black surface. It is obvious that this is popular with musicians and DJs. Piano keys or mixing consoles can be defined on the same device and swapped on the fly.
Use in the niche field
Since video producer Stephanie Tresch can play the piano, but has no need for a virtual piano, she only becomes aware of a purple overlay. It is the Video Editing Overlay, optimised for use with Adobe Premiere Pro.
She presses one or two buttons, moves a slider to the side and tries it out. Because an overlay not only offers push buttons like a keyboard, but can also perform scrolling functions and more complex commands. Copy, paste, select layer, sort clips, cut and all kinds of other things.
"I could work infinitely faster with this," she says. Although she is still a little sceptical, she is slowly warming up to the rectangle. After a short demo, she quickly edits a demo video and the smile on her face gets bigger and bigger.
Another reason why Stephanie ended up buying a Morph: When she and I are travelling to trade shows in Berlin or Barcelona or Las Vegas, she has a keyboard with her so she can use shortcuts in Premiere Pro. That's all well and good, works great according to the video producer, but takes up a lot of space.
"I don't actually need most of the keyboard," she says.
But she can't do without the parts of the keyboard she needs if she wants to work productively and efficiently.
"And it replaces the mouse for me too."
The overlay for the Morph takes care of that, because instead of over 100 buttons, the overlay has 53, all designed for video editing.
A toy for developers
The Sensel Morph can be purchased with a transparent mat. Then you can experiment: Make your own layout, print it out on a piece of paper and place it under the transparent mat. You can also share the layout with the Morph Community. If an overlay receives enough support from the Community, Sensel will buy the design from you and print an overlay from it. Sensel also sells a cable for developers that allows you to use the open SDK. And the black rectangle is also compatible with Raspberry Pi minicomputers and Arduinos.
The first test at the stand is impressive. The sensitivity of the morph is set so that you don't really have to press hard on it. However, as the black surface reacts not just to one pressure level, but to an almost infinite number of them, the morph allows for many fine adjustments.
The overlay is made of silicone: "If I work through the night and spill a drink on the Morph, I can simply wash the overlay off."
You can find all articles on CES 2019 here.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.