Originally published at: Flux Keyboard has an adapting display behind transparent keys | Boing Boing
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On paper its an interesting idea but considering how dirt and stuff gets into keyboards i think having transparent keys with one big display underneath leads to a whole set of problems. Personally i’d be more keen on e-ink key caps, and the low power consumption seems a better fit for the use case.
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That’s a cool idea 
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i wonder how angle would affect this one… if you look down on your keyboard, vs if you generally have your keyboard more in front of your body. unless the keys are really thin, and without much travel distance maybe? ( eta: another plus of e-ink keycaps i’d think )
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Looking online it does seem that there’s been a handful, but all of them seem to be the chiclet style keys (can’t vouch for how good they are either). If we could get a mechanical keyboard that has e-ink caps that would truly be the perfect keyboard
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The Elgato Stream Deck operates on a similar principle, transparent keys in front of a screen. They keys are beyond mushy and quite unpleasant to use, however.
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Seems they thought about that. The entire transparent key assembly lifts off in one piece for easy cleaning of the display and/or changing to a different physical key layout(say, Ortholinear).
*Edit - apparently they can’t do Ortho as the sensor positions are fixed. 
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The actual switches seem to be hall effect sensors underneath the display. With the key assembly removed it looks seamless and as easy to wipe down as a garden-variety monitor. They have a short video showing it on their website.
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Yeah this is the first thing I thought of; I bet this won’t help at all.
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Not yet, but I hope to be able to tell everyone how it looks, feels, and works come April of next year (best guess of current shipping estimates; actual dates may vary). They’re still solving a few manufacturing issues, selecting and ordering various parts, filling out import paperwork, very typical kickstarter updates for a project that’s still five months from shipping their rewards.
Until then I’m enjoying my RGB glowing, swirling rainbow circle keyboard.
… I don’t want to have to look at a keyboard in the first place 
wouldn’t it be more helpful to have keys we can distinguish by touch
I’ve used a prototype maglev keyboard with ramp key guides. It wasn’t good, but there are worse keyboards in production.
The Flux looks like it has vertical key guides, which might make it better.
It should also be possible to tune the magnets, possibly even using non-uniform magnets to tune resistance throughout the travel travel for linear, buckling, or other key feel.
This. And professional a/v production surfaces have been using something like this for 10+ years. It has its uses! It’ll be interesting to see if a prosumer keyboard is one of them.
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That seems to be what they’re doing. On the website you can choose between a tactile or linear key feel.
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Or, you get a blank keyboard and map the different layouts in your brain!
(Me mum just called it touch typing, but you’d need to put quite a spin on that to market it.)
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I don’t live my life in any one program where I bake the keymappings into my neurons through repetition. I don’t use GIMP as a daily image editor. I trot it out once or twice a month to touch up a picture, to crop it, maybe to add laser beam eyes to Gandalf for a meme, that kind of thing. I don’t want to have to remember to hit “P” for Palette. I want the keyboard labels to match what they do.
Or OBS. Do I want to remember all the different keys for inputs? Or do I want to tap on the live feed I see from camera 1 and have camera 1 appear on the stream?
And I don’t want to spend my time learning those sorts of things. That’s exactly what computers are good for.
And for all other times, I want to have a koi pond swimming on my desk. I want the koi to appear interested in following the fingertips tapping the surface of the water above them. Maybe I’ll have Care Bears frolicking down there. Or maybe a Michael Bay keyboard that puts explosions beneath every keystroke. I have no idea what kinds of things I’ll want to see on the desktop.
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You call that living?
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