In Mother Russia Keyboards Love You

Remember a while ago, when the Maximus Optimus keyboard was announced, and we were all ‘woha, such a cool concept, to be able to assign any symbols we want to our keyboard’s keys’? Okay, maybe you don’t remember, but I do and my friend Rafa told me about another keyboard concept made by the same guys: the Tactus Optimus keyboard.

The concept is even nicer than the other one, as this is basically a touchscreen surface where you can configure about everything key-wise. Don’t want the regular querty keyboard keys showing? You can change that. Want bigger-sized keys? It allows that. Want to watch videos on it? You can.

My inner usability/user interface geek squeaked a bit when I saw this. The ideas for its uses came flying – imagine you can create ‘profiles’ for the keyboard allowing you to just pick what configuration you want from a list to do something specific (a configuration for when you use the PC as a media center, another for when you play a role-playing game, etc.), imagine it has a decent support for widgets. It really does have endless possibilities.

If it goes from concept to the market, it will probably be sold at a prohibitive price (the Maximus Optimus costs something like 350 euros), but hopefully, this tech will catch on and eventually we’ll have mass market prices. Eventually.