New Media Exploration: Optimus Maximus

It was a few months ago that a friend showed me the Optimus Maximus keyboard. Designed by the Russian studio Art. Lebedev, the Optimus Maximus is designed with absolute user customizability in mind.


So what sets this keyboard apart from the ordinary $10 office variety? Well, every single key has a tiny OLED screen inside of it (48 x 48 pixels, about the size of a Win XP icon). This means that you can customize not only the functionality of any key you want, but its appearance as well. You can change your keys' font and color, or you can use pictures taken from the internet or drawn yourself. From what I can tell, the keyboard comes with a micro SD chip to save your configurations to, so you can take your layout with you to the office (provided that "the office" has an Optimus Maximus, which isn't highly likely at this point).

Art. Lebedev has put up a pretty sweet basic simulator/demo of the product here, which is definitely worth checking out. As you can see, when you press and hold shift, all of the keys would dynamically update to show new symbols. Additional configurations are previewed as well; you can see alternate letter-based schemes for languages such as French and Spanish, as well as a layout with asian characters and even sample image-based control layouts for Photoshop and Counter-strike. The photoshop layout in particular looks like it would be awfully useful in MAT classes at MCC, as it would almost entirely remove the need to memorize hotkeys.

As cool as this keyboard sounds, it does have some flaws.

Firstly, it's expensive. Depending on where you get it, the high-end model costs between $1,000 and $1,800. There is an alternative plan: you can buy a cheap version of the keyboard for $450 that has only a single OLED key, and then replace the other "static" keys for $10 apiece as you need them; still, this is a lot of money for a novelty keyboard.

Secondly, according to several reviewers the keys just don't feel right. Complaints include that they're too large, high resistance makes typing tiring, and that the lack of space between keys cause too many mistypes.

I liked this video review because it gives the viewer a good idea of what the keyboard can do, but it also talks about the keyboard's shortcomings.

Even with its noticeable drawbacks, the concept is very appealing, both to geeks and to users that want to make their computers easier to use. If Art. Lebedev can find a way to make their product cheaper and improve the issues with their keys, a revised version of the Optimus Maximus could become a dominant figure in tomorrow's technological market.