optimus (prime) keyboard.
(it’s a little funny/lame that when i saw this keyboard the first thing I thought was “that’s badass”)
The Optimus Keyboard is pretty cool. Every key on this keyboard, designed by the Art Lebedev studio in Moscow, is a tiny standalone display that shows the function of said key. in other words every single key is a 32×32 or 64×64 LCD (or maybe OLED?) that can show a letter, an image, a word, or whatever you want, showing what it’s used for.
It’s a really cool idea - you have one universal keyboard that works in all languages, for all games, and you never have to do anything. It even has a bank of buttons on the left side that you can customize to launch different apps and put the icon on the button. If you want to type in a different language, just change the keys to display that languages keyset.
Plus, they have examples of program customized keysets - for Photoshop change the keys to show the icon of the command for each shortcut key. For a game like Quake you can replace WASD with an Up, Left, Down, Middle button, and use each weapon’s icon in place of 1-9, show a grenade on G, change “Shift” to Run/Walk, etc.
This is even better than the ZBoard, which is a pretty neat idea in itself. But with a keyboard like this one, you just buy one device, instead of the base keyboard and the customized keysets that the Zboard needs. The Optimus keyboard takes it one step further and customizes the entire thing. Hopefully this design will come to fruition in the near future. Except they accidentally put an Option key on it instead of a windows button.
via engadget.com
July 14th, 2005 at 6:13 pm
Seriously, isn’t that rad? Like four different people forwarded it to me this morning.
Unfortunately I’m sure it would cost like $1000.
But still.
July 15th, 2005 at 2:14 am
i don’t know, it might be cheaper, like $300-400.
in the future, all keyboards will be reconfigurable. i have seen it.