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The adaptive Optimus keyboard
updated by rck, 2005-07-26

Native english speakers could consider themselves lucky. They don't have a need for accents, don't know about umlauts, about the -symbol, about the chinese, arabic, korean alphabet, and so on. A few letters, a few numbers, a few special keys there you have your english keyboard. The Optimus keyboard is a design study that does more than that.

Instead of having the letters painted on the keyboard, the keys are little displays. I counted 132 keys, that makes 132 small displays. Obviously, this invention is not from an native english speaker.

Made in Russia

the art directors

No, the Optimus keyboard is an russian invention. The Lebedev Studio claims to be the biggest design studio in Russia and has a few interesting objects in their portfolio. Their work includes a font face, a microwave oven with a heart, a phone with only 4 keys and a mouse that's a mouse-pointer.

Art.lebedev does Webdesign as well and has a couple of wallpapers online. What I like about their website is their minimal approach. On the one hand, you have handcrafted, brown illustrations with white and orange/red highlights.

They are contrasted by black Times New Roman letters (=default fontset of web browsers) on white background. Art.lebedev didn't even bother to change the default link-colours.

The keyboard

www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/'>front view
front view

But let's look back to the keyboard. Well, I almost wrote everything you could want to know about it. It's minimal. It's light-grey. It has a lot of little displays on it. And it's only a design-study now, you can't buy it yet.

During its slashdotting, Lebedev Studio came up with a couple of additional answers people had. The plan is to release it in 2006, that's the only information that matters to me. And I guess I want one.

Maybe I'd like to try it out in a shop first, though. Interesting concept.

(found in the Informatik-Forum)




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  • No Subject

    Posted on 2005-08-09 12:13:22 By MosMensk[1]

    You gotta love this keyboard biggrin No more worries about what shortcut-key does in what program..sweeet!

    [Reply ]

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