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Optimus Maximus: Keyboardus Absentus |
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Dr. Samuel Says -
Smart Design
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Tuesday, 09 October 2007 |
Winning the award for the most excruciatingly postponed product rollout ever, the Optimus Maximus display keyboard , which first made the blogosphere rounds in 1455, the same year Pope Nicholas V penned the widely panned encyclical Romanus Pontifex to King Afonso V of Portugal. I'm sure you recall...
 I kid, of course. But the Optimus Maximus buzz has been percolating for
at least two years now, with bits and teases regularly leaked from the
Russian Art. Lebedev design studio. The OM (I refuse to type the full
name again) is a computer keyboard with customizable graphical displays
on every key. The idea being that the keyboard would allow for greater
user interaction by dynamically displaying the the current function of
every key. So, for instance, when you hit SHIFT, upper-case letters
would be displayed. Or CTRL, or ALT, or ALT-CTRL, or whatever.
What's more, the keyboard could change from the standard QWERTY layout
to alternative like the Dvorak layout. And lest we be too
Roman/Latin-centric, let us note that the keyboard can also switch to
other alphabets -- Cyrillic, say, or Georgian or Arabic. Optimus
supports all languages supported by the operating system.
The potential applications are endless. Graphics professionals and
gamers are typically cited as two of the main target markets. Something
like PhotoShop, for instance, has approximately 1 billion functions
mapped to various keys and key-combos. And gamers, of course, find
their own arcane uses for otherwise innocent keys. Depending on the
context, that humble little "w" key can be used to trigger an avalanche
of HTML coding, invert a photograph, or frag an entire platoon of space
marines.
Still, we must wait. The Lebedev folks are accepting pre-orders now,
and word is they're still trying to line up a manufacturing deal that
makes sense. Meanwhile, they're promising limited pre-order deliveries
around the end of the year. The OM will support Windows and Mac
initially; Linux later, maybe. Check this chatty little FAQ for more
details.
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