Optimus Keyboard With OLED Display Keys

Koskun writes "What appears to be a Russian design company has on their website a keyboard in which the keys are using OLED to display what function the keys represent. The product is Art. Lebedev Studio's Optimus Keyboard. The uses of this could be amazing. They have pictures of layouts for Photoshop and Quake, as well as a QWERTY and Russian. Here's hoping that this will make it to a production model and not just a design model."

Comments

Good Idea, Bad Price

[Anonymous Coward]

Coral Cache Link

It's not even a "design model". It's a "rendered model". Sweet concept. You'd spend a bloody fortune on 116 individual color OLED displays - in several sizes - and all the circuitry, interfacing, and drivers to run them. I see that they are Macintosh fans, though.

Re:Good Idea, Bad Price

[Gnascher]

It's a great idea ... but utterly fake.

These guys are digital artists ... not keyboard manufacturers.

It's a really neat idea, and one that may even some day be created. I'd imagine that it would be prohibitively expensive to do today though.

Optimus Keyboard?

[American AC in Paris]

A prime idea, that.

Re:Optimus Keyboard?

[JoshRosenbaum]

I don't think there's a "+1 Transformer's Reference", but if there was, I'd give it to ya. ;)

Get these into our highschools NOW!

[Seumas]

Since all of our jobs are being outsourced to other countries, this keyboard will be perfect for public schools where they will need to teach children to function in the wonderful world of order-taking at fast food restaurants on those nifty little picture-only cash-registers..

Viruses will have a field day!

[garcia]

Cool, not only could viruses switch what appears on your screen when you type you could also wake up and find a huge picture of goatse on your keyboard.

Woo-Hoo!

[hellomynameisclinton]

I can finally get past the second step - I'll have an ANY KEY!

OLED?

[Pyrosz]

I would think that the new e-paper technologies would be better suited as they maintain the image with the power off. This would enable the keyboard to only use power while the keys are changed (or if they are animated), and of course the wireless portion would use power.

If they get these out on the market (using e-paper tech) for under $300 CAN I would buy one asap.

Yes, every key would change...

[Omega]

That would be really funny if the prompt read, "Press any key" and every key on the keyboard changed to read "Any". :)

Re:Good idea, really?

[conigs]

I beg to differ that this is not practical. This would be especially useful to video editors or anyone in media that uses a shit-ton of keyboard hotkeys/shortcuts. Take video for example... Avid and FCP keyboards are all over the place. Imagine having a kayboard like this which avid or fcp could send the user's keyboard layout to, and presto! Instant, accurate representation of all the keyboard short-cuts. This is far better than buying a pre-manufactured keyboard that has the shortcuts printed on the keys... especially if you change the layout (as many do on avid and fcp and many other programs).

Re:Useless

[Hektor_Troy]

Sure. I can touchtype, and I've been able to do that for the last 13 years at least. But it'd still be VERY handy.

When I'm using a new program, I'd love for my keyboard to show me what keys do what. Hold down shift and a new set of functions pop up on the keyboard. Other modifiers and you get more.

Touch typing is useless when you don't know that pressing Ctrl+Shift+Space will do what you're trying to find in Tools->More->Neat->Macro->Experimental->Do not touch.

Or are you just somehow magically able to know just what each and every key combination does in a program you've never used before?