Keyboard Design

Art. Lebedev, an industrial design company responsible for coming up with very creative solutions, have recently released the Optimus Maximus keyboard. This is something special, the keyboard, available at $460, contains a customizable interface, by this I mean you choose what each key displays. Thats right, each key on the keyboard contains a small color screen which can display any image, the action of this key can then be defined on the computer. This means that it can be set to display any language as well as other character sets like maths functions and HTML tags. Otimus Maximus also contains a few other goodies like an SD card slot for storage of layouts and two USB 2.0 ports. This idea will definitely pave the way for the future of keyboards. Keyboard layouts can be changed quickly by the press of a button, so for example, a normal layout can be set up for typing, containing the regular letter keys but switch to Dreamweaver and the keyboard can change to display HTML tags or for Photoshop can be changed to display useful hotkeys. Each key contains an OLED screen roughly 1x1cm, 48x48 pixels capable of displaying 65536 colours.The same company have also designed the Optimus Tactus, a keyboard containing no physical keys, rather a touch screen which too can be customized fully .