Once upon a time in Russia, a design company named Art Lebedev came up with a brilliant idea: make a keyboard with small, configurable screens for each key. This way, the keyboard could physically be reconfigured on the fly for each task for greater useability and better user experience. For example, a word processor might have custom keys for making the text bold or italic.

When the idea became public, people were almost lining with cash in hand. “Where can we buy it? We want to buy it now.”, they said. But alas, at that time the keyboard existed only as a computer-generated picture.

So the people waited, patiently, while dreaming about the new keyboard that could automatically change the keys to display weapons used in Quake, forward/backward buttons for web browsing, and so on. After a few years, the keyboard was finally ready and went into production. People were excited – you could almost physically touch the Internet buzz floating around the keyboard!

Finally, the keyboard, priced at $1564 (yes, that’s over thousand five hundred US dollars), ends up in a review in Engadget. And what did the reviewers think of the keyboard?

They liked the small keys with screens, they liked the way it’s configured, they liked the way you can replace the keys but as for typing, they said: “Typing on it, well, sucks.”

And this is the point when the film sort of stops and you hear a funny halt-screeching sound effect.

Let’s get this straight: you have a keyboard with a price tag of $1564, and “typing on it, well, sucks“?

Umm… Doesn’t exactly look like a good combination.

Even with the US Dollar (or should I say US Peso) going down the drain, $1564 is still a very high price for a keyboard. In other words, Art Lebedev have created a very expensive keyboard which is unsuitable for typing. Since it’s kind of a second Optimus version (the first version was a silly 3-button keyboard with similar reconfigurable keys) it might not have been an epic fail, but a fail nevertheless.

I’m disappointed, as I sort of waited for the keyboard too with the secret hope of perhaps buying it, but at the same time I remain hopeful. I hope the Art Lebedev people will fix the shortcomings of the Optimus Maximus keyboard (i.e. make it a keyboard which is possible to use as a keyboard) and seriously drop the price. The good news is they’ve already dropped the price from $1500+ to $462 (ca. 360 e). The other good news is they already have made a concept on a next generation keyboard, Optimus Tactus, which looks like a keyboard-shaped touch screen. I hope it will support multiple simultaneous keypresses too.

With the Optimus Tactus, if it ever is produced, we will finally get one step closer to Michael Okuda’s LCARS user interfaces used in the modern Star Trek series. Bringing the LCARS UI from the realm of fiction into the real world has always made a lot of sense, I think, as it’s very natural to reconfigure the input device based on the use case. That way you will get much a more intuitive user interface, which means less disruptions for the user, and all in all efficiency in using such an interface. If you did not really get the description, find some Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and watch the people interact with the computers. It really is inspirational to think of such systems in reality.

Post script note about LCARS: One aspect of the LCARS of Star Trek seems like doing Model-View-Controller twice, like in two levels; once to separate the UI from the data managing (engine) parts, then the second time for the UI part only: separate that what you expect to see (=the visualization of data) from the interface used to manipulate it, and deliver that interface to a gadget with which the user interacts directly and physically. In other words, the visualization of data is decoupled from the UI with which the user manipulates the data.