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This thing looks sweet. Ok, I'll be the first to admit I have an electronics habit almost as bad as some people's drug habits. This thing looks so damn cool.
Each key is an LCD display, allowing you to display any image to any key. Really cool stuff.
For gaming, this is huge. You can customize the keys to display “run“ “shoot“ or whatever the game requires. This is cool for obscure game settings that are critical during play, but not used for the basic game play. |
There are some other cool things too. There's a bank of keys that you can assign to do whatever you want. Note the picture above, explorer's and iTunes icons appear on their own keys. I think that is neat. You could conceiveably have a screen saver that ran across the keys on your keyboard. I would imagine we will see an endless onslaught of 'skins' for your optimus keyboard just like all the bad skins for winamp.
There will be some good ones too I'm sure. The questionable things are that this company appears to be out of the former Soviet Union, but they claim the device will be available world wide. We don't know much about the weight, feel, and things like how much pressure / resistance it takes to push the keys.
It's supposed to be platform agnostic, working w/ any ccomputer (with drivers I'm sure). There will be an open source SDK
You can learn more about the keyboard here and subscibe to receive updates as they are available.
http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/