Optimus Pride
Just a few hours after I got off the phone with Artemy Lebedev, creator of the Optimus Maximus keyboard, I got a call from my boss: “Did you see the Russian news wires?” he asked. “Lebedev’s been shot.” It seemed the 33-year-old designer had checked himself into a hospital after sustaining a gunshot wound to the leg. The tip came from a commenter on Lebedev’s LiveJournal blog, who in turn cited a “reliable source.” Neither the post nor the subsequent reports mentioned who shot Art Lebedev or why. Most perplexing, the incident had occurred a few days before I interviewed him. Had he been speaking to me from the hospital bed without mentioning it?
Shortly after that, the designer posted a cheery statement on his blog – “I’ll live” – that neither confirmed nor denied the story. A six-second video clip of Lebedev walking in a hospital corridor, apparently touching the wall for support, also did nothing to clear things up.
Eventually, the story was deemed false. But the gossip, cryptic blog entries, and video snippets the incident generated had been my formal introduction to the prolific rumor mill surrounding Russia’s foremost graphic and web designer. And while the “Who Shot Art Lebedev?” story was swiftly debunked, the Lebedev saga I was interested in is one that began as myth, but ultimately, amazingly, came true. It’s the story of the Optimus Maximus.
On July 13, 2005, a series of curious photos began proliferating through the blogosphere. The most intriguing depicted a field of glowing keys, each bearing the tiny, recognizable icon of a popular application or web site. To tech fanatics, the implication was abundantly clear: someone had made a keyboard with tiny screens embedded in every key. The color screens suggested OLED technology – the matrices of organic, light-emitting pixels used in most cell-phone displays. “That makes it entirely configurable,” technology blog OhGizmo.com enthused. “Entirely, completely configurable.” Each key’s function – and the image representing it – could be changed at a whim. An accompanying press release suggested some possible layouts, including Cyrillic, Ancient Greek, Georgian, Arabic, music notes, numerals, HTML codes, mathematical functions, and icons for editing software like Photoshop and Final Cut. For people who log in serious hours in front of a monitor – which is to say, most of us – this was as close to the Holy Grail as it got.
“Who Shot Art Lebedev?” story was swiftly debunked, the Lebedev saga I was interested in is one that began as myth, but ultimately, amazingly, came true. It’s the story of the Optimus Maximus.
Westerners were mostly unfamiliar with Art.Lebedev Studio, but it was immediately clear that these Russians knew how to make an entrance. Another provocative picture, aimed at the excitable gamer set, showed a key layout customized for the popular game Quake. “I just wet myself,” wrote one commenter at Gearlive.com. The sentiment was widely shared.
When it became clear that the images were computerized renderings, and not an actual prototype, many took the whole thing to be a prank. But Lebedev told interviewers that he had already been working on the project, dubbed “Optimus,” for four years. A prototype would be ready by autumn 2005. It would ship in 2006. Best of all, he predicted the revolutionary device would cost “less than a good mobile phone.”
“I just wet myself,” wrote one commenter at Gearlive.com.
If the designer’s intention had been to generate hype for his keyboard, he’d succeeded. Everyone now wanted one, although many doubted it would ever come to fruition. Fortunately, Lebedev was no stranger to obstacles. When he started offering his services as a web designer in Russia in the mid-’90s, the concept of web design didn’t exist there yet. He’d had to create it, and the demand for it, by designing clients’ sites for free. Within less than a decade, Art.Lebedev Studio became Russia’s largest and most respected design firm, working on everything from magazines to microwaves. Lebedev himself has designed some of Russia’s most popular web sites, including Yandex (the Google counterpart), and the leading news site Gazeta.ru.
The dream of a luminous, configurable keyboard was one he’d been harboring since he was a teenager. He knew it wasn’t impossible: Reinhard Engstler had developed the first programmable keyboard in Germany in 1984, using black-and-white LCD (liquid crystal display) screens. But attempts to market these had fizzled, and the technology involved had been nowhere near as ambitious as what the Optimus required: animated color images that covered the entire key, rather than a fraction of it, not to mention a cost-effective scheme for mass-production.
One field Lebedev had little experience in, it seemed, was tempering expectations. By the end of 2005, the flurry of hype and skepticism around the Optimus project was so thick that many were already classifying it as “vaporware” – breakthrough technology that is promised by a certain date, but never materializes. “Lots of votes were cast for the nifty-looking Optimus keyboard,” Wired Magazine wrote in the intro to its annual Vaporware Awards. “It looked too good to be true, which is one of the classic makings of vaporware – except for one thing: The company said it'll ship in 2006.” In other words, calm down, it’s ineligible by a full year.
But the pessimists were soon vindicated. On January 9, 2006, Lebedev said he was putting off launching the keyboard until February 1, 2007.
The dream of a luminous, configurable keyboard was one he’d been harboring since he was a teenager.
In the meantime, he was working on a side project meant to silence the naysayers. The Optimus Mini Three would employ the same OLED technology as the keyboard, but with just three buttons. About the size and shape of a remote control, it was meant to sit next to a regular keyboard, acting as a flashy, configurable sidebar.
Doing a dry run proved wise, because the Mini Three was in trouble as soon as it was announced. Slated to appear in May 2006, the ship date was pushed back to July of that year, and the price jumped from $100 to $160.
When it finally shipped on July 12, reviews were mixed. It was nicely packaged, but emitted a high-pitched, pet-neutering noise. The displays were cool, but the keys wobbled. The keys could play back video, but only at five frames per second. Hackers could do all kinds of amazing things with it (like rig it to run Pong), but the software had some major bugs.
Rather than retreating into his lair, Lebedev chose to ride into the storm of scrutiny by creating a project diary in his not-quite-flawless English, titled “The Life and Adventures of Optimus Keyboards.” The designer’s main reason for keeping the blog was that he appreciated feedback and wanted fans to share in the creative process. The other advantage of making the blog his main point of contact with the public was that he could dispense key information – especially regarding setbacks – surreptitiously. The second post, for instance, contained an offhanded mention of the shipping date, which had quietly migrated to “after spring 2007.”
The next post let loose a bombshell: the keyboard wasn’t going to be OLED anymore. As readers were left to guess what the screens would be made of, another setback was announced: the “Optimus 113” had become the “Optimus 103.” Readers pressured Lebedev to elaborate. When he confessed that this meant he’d had to shave off ten auxiliary keys on the left side of the board to save on costs, the fans rebelled with dozens of angry comments. One said she found it “mildly insulting that, as designers, you can't appreciate the real value of the extra keys.”
Lebedev was taken aback. “Some of the comments on the images published here are really funny,” he wrote mirthlessly. “It's like some restaurant would decide to publish chef's thoughts on a new soup recipe, and some folks would look at the process and say, ‘Gee, he pours water in! We will never dine here!’”
“Some of the comments on the images published here are really funny. It's like some restaurant would decide to publish chef's thoughts on a new soup recipe, and some folks would look at the process and say, ‘Gee, he pours water in! We will never dine here!’”
“That's a flawed analogy,” commenter Slamonella retorted. “To keep with the food theme, it would be more akin to promising people the prospect of a seven-course meal for several years, then announcing that you were only going to serve hors d'oeuvres.”
There was a dangerous rift forming. To Lebedev the graphic designer, those initial Photoshop previews had been a snazzy platform for presenting an idea. But to those who had fallen in love with that illusion, the previews were a sacred blueprint. Any deviation was tantamount to a betrayal.
Inevitably, things got worse. Mockups of the keys seemed to suggest that the screens would not be taking up the full surface of the keys, as they had in the original renders. And then the kicker: no color. At least not on the 103-key model. “B&W is perfect for 95% of all tasks a keyboard requires,” Lebedev hedged. Over 200 irate respondents disagreed. “I’m OUT!” became the refrain of the day.
“I'm incredibly happy with all the sarcasm and critique my previous post is getting,” Lebedev responded on November 29. “Nothing inspires me more than tons of negative opinions.” Uh huh. Then he revealed the price: $1,200.
At that point, the backlash became so intense that it seems the designer finally listened to his critics. Or perhaps to his own heart. On December 8, just weeks before clinching the No. 10 spot at Wired’s 2006 Vaporware Awards, Lebedev summoned the courage to scrap the plan for the black-and-white Optimus 103 entirely and refocus his attention on the 113-key color model. On March 15, 2007, he gave the Optimus a new last name: Maximus (inspired, he later told me, by Zeus).
“Nothing inspires me more than tons of negative opinions.” Uh huh. Then he revealed the price: $1,200.
There would be more setbacks that very month – the OLED manufacturer had to back out, and it became clear that the screens would have to remain stationary underneath moving, scratch-resistant key caps. But Lebedev and his team refused to be rattled. A new OLED manufacturer was found in April 2007. And when the Maximus was repriced a few days later at $1,564, they took the jeers in stride, citing that 1564 was Shakespeare’s birthday.
Finally, after FCC certification, some successful demos of the prototype at trade shows, and another appearance on Wired’s pedestal of shame, the Optimus Maximus was ready to ship. The first 200 units moved on February 21, 2008 – two years later than Lebedev had originally projected.
Then came the reviews. Most began by remarking, rightly, on how amazing it was that the Optimus existed at all. And on the product’s innovations, critics were effusive in their praise. Lebedev had delivered on his central promises that the displays be bright and colorful and the keys infinitely configurable. You could play back a movie on them. Shifting from one configuration to another was instantaneous or nearly instantaneous, and mapping keyboards to applications was “ridiculously easy,” according to Ryan Block of Engadget.
The drawbacks were also readily apparent. First of all, $1,564 was more than a good mobile phone, and more than most people were ready to spend on a keyboard. “Optimus… Maximus? For $1,500, does it transform into a semi-truck?” one reader mused.
“Optimus… Maximus? For $1,500, does it transform into a semi-truck?” one reader mused.
And though it was beautiful to look at, anyone picturing the Optimus twirling gracefully in the carefree, zero-gravity universe of an Apple commercial was destined to be disappointed. The consensus – and this couldn’t have been more ironic for a keyboard from a country whose biggest technological hits came from repurposed military technologies – was this: the thing is a tank. “This is probably the heaviest, biggest, and sturdiest keyboard we have ever used,” wrote Jason Chen of Gizmodo, who spent weeks blogging with the Optimus before reviewing it. “If you heard an intruder in your house and you wanted to decide between a bat and the Maximus, it'd be a tough decision.” And wireless it was not. “Not only is it wired to your computer, there's an AC adapter wire as well. Double wired, you might say,” Chen said. (Lebedev’s usual retort: the device will be wireless as soon as someone invents wireless electricity.)
The worst was yet to come, however. It appeared that the keyboard was not particularly good for, well, typing. The keys were unusually loud and “clacky,” per Gizmodo. Block, who reviewed his Optimus right out of the box, was harsher. “Typing on it, well, sucks. …It just requires way too much force to depress keys… “We sit around and type all day long and this thing wore us out in about 30 seconds to a minute. Carpal sufferers, beware.”
After hearing all this, I was dying to experience the Maximus for myself, so I was pleased to find the floor model at Lebedev’s Moscow boutique unoccupied. The Optimus was less bulky than I’d been led to expect, but still a good deal heavier than most laptops. The keys were stunningly bright, and the “configurator” for programming them was as sleek as any Mac application, although the eight minutes I spent was not nearly enough time to figure it out.
The first time I pressed the caps lock key, I gasped as all the lowercase letters on the keys magically changed to uppercase. But typing was indeed a hassle. Surely any new keyboard has a learning curve, but I was making typos every other word. The keys were so flat and smooth they were almost slippery. It wasn’t enough to move my fingers anymore; my hands had to hover, hummingbird-like over the board, which did get tiring after just a few seconds.
The first time I pressed the caps lock key, I gasped as all the lowercase letters on the keys magically changed to uppercase.
I could now see why sites had recommended that Optimus owners keep an alternate “typing keyboard” nearby. But the masses were not quite ready for specialization to shake up the once-placid keyboard industry. Nor was the irony of a keyboard unfit for typing lost on them. “What’s next?” one Gizmodo commenter mused, “A pricey monitor not meant for viewing?” Some proposed cheap ways to jerry-rig an Optimus at home – paint the keys on a basic configurable keyboard white, then suspend a digital projector above them! Others ridiculed the concept itself. “This is like installing an LCD screen into the steering wheel of a car, hooked up to a camera that points forward, so you can see where you’re driving.”
Sure, it was hard to type on. But useless? Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired and contributor at the New York Times Magazine, admits that the ideal keyboard is one that is “ergonomically invisible, like it’s just your hand reaching into the computer.” By that metric, we should never need to look at the keys. But Thompson sees enormous potential in the Optimus. The keyboard we have inherited, he notes, is really just an appendage of the typewriter; fine for typing words, but irrelevant for the myriad other functions a computer now performs. “So when you encounter a keyboard like Optimus that is capable of morphing and changing,” Thompson argues, “it expands your idea of what can be done with that keyboard, and by extension, your computer.”
“But,” he adds, “there’s no way in hell I would spend the money on it. Maybe if it were $200.”
“This is like installing an LCD screen into the steering wheel of a car, hooked up to a camera that points forward, so you can see where you’re driving.”
I still hadn’t made up my own mind about the Optimus when I called Lebedev.
True to his aesthetic, the designer sought to diffuse all criticism with one simple explanation: “Throughout the process, the biggest problem that confronted us is that nobody in the world wants to create anything new,” he said. Skeptical journalists and consumers were just the beginning; the very manufacturers he was collaborating with were constantly dragging their feet, encouraging him to settle for parts they already knew how to make. He described the difficulty of creating something as simple as one individual OLED screen. Screens of that size simply didn’t exist. Nor did the scratch-resistant, perfectly transparent caps that fit over them. “There was no precedent for what we were doing,” he said. “We were working in absolute darkness.”
That explained the delays. And the price? “Sure it’s expensive, but there’s nothing else like it.” People should expect to pay a lot for brand new technology, he argued.
The fact that it’s hard to type on? “The keys are bigger. That’s all these people are bothered by. If you remember, we had to adapt to notebooks [laptops] because their keys were smaller and closer together than a keyboard on a desktop.”
And the notion that it’s really not all that useful? Nonsense. Designers, video editors and audio engineers, he insisted, were benefiting from the Optimus every day. But the keyboard also had a higher purpose from the very beginning – one that American critics tend to forget. “I wanted to create a typing interface that is compatible with Cyrillic,” Lebedev said. Keyboards, computers and the Internet were created for languages that employ the Latin alphabet, and English in particular. Lebedev wasn’t annoyed about this. Indeed, he’d benefited hugely from his country’s belated embrace of the computer. But it had always been clear to him that the typical keyboard layout was treating one half of the world like guests. As if their letters were an awkward substitute for the 26 ***real*** letters. No wonder he overcompensated by enabling video playback for every key. Otherwise, he risked excluding the ever-growing language of video memes. (And, for that matter, the illiterate.)
Lebedev said that, despite all the obstacles, he wasn’t planning on selling the idea to anyone. For him, the budding Optimus line is about the creative process, not the money. And he would never be able to stomach someone else taking control and messing things up. “I don’t think anyone will come close to what we’ve done with Optimus any time soon,” he said. “It’s the ultimate keyboard.”
“Sure it’s expensive, but there’s nothing else like it.”
He’d almost had me sold. But something about that boast had a familiar bravado that gave me pause. Consider the new idea he shared with me: the Textus. Basically an iPhone without the phone, it would only used for texting and emails, but would presumably perfect both. Oh, and it will be a little bigger than an iPhone.
A pattern was emerging, and I suddenly realized what it was: there’s something maddeningly Russian about this whole thing. The Optimus was conceived with the noblest intentions, and part of me desperately wanted to believe in Lebedev’s invention. But when users keep the unwieldy thing on their desks in the hope that someday soon the software will be perfected, someday their hands will adjust to the Ultimate Keyboard, they are, philosophically speaking, not very different from the millions of Russians who offered themselves as specimens in a 70-year social science experiment. In both cases, the concept is so good that you’re willing to suspend disbelief when the execution hits. Temporarily, anyway.
A few weeks after the Lebedev interview, I spoke about the Optimus with a former employee at his studio (full disclosure: she now works for RUSSIA!). When it first came out, she said, all the designers followed Lebedev’s lead and replaced their old keyboard with an Optimus. But as the weeks passed, the old keyboards began to reappear from their drawers. Gradually, the clacking died down.