How the Stream Deck rose from the ashes of a legendary keyboard

Back in 2005, a small firm offered a tantalizing vision of the future of computer keyboards.

What if your keyboard was filled with tiny screens that showed you exactly what any given press would do, each built into a crystal-clear key? The keys would morph and shift as you needed, transforming from letters and numbers to full-color icons and app shortcuts, depending on what you were doing.

Readers and tech bloggers adored the idea. “It’s about time someone shook up this stagnant keyboard market,” declared Engadget. “The concept is fantastic,” wrote Gizmodo. Slashdot lit up.

The keyboard was just a concept, dreamed up by Art Lebedev, a Russian design firm, and it was an ambitious idea at that: called the Optimus Maximus, it would require over 100 built-in screens using display technology that wasn’t readily available at the time. With all the excitement, the firm decided to make it real.

The journey to create the Optimus Maximus would take years and end in multiple commercial failures. But Art Lebedev’s vision and the technology created along the way would live on and ultimately find widespread success — a success that’s been hidden inside another popular product: Elgato’s Stream Deck, a small desktop accessory covered in morphing, full-color keys.

By the time Elgato came to release its first Stream Deck in 2017, Art Lebedev’s Optimus keyboards had faded into history. But there’s more linking the two devices than a core idea. In fact, the Stream Deck hardware came from precisely the same company that developed the Optimus Maximus’ keys. In a very real sense, Art Lebedev’s work laid the foundations for what Elgato would go on to create.

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In 2010, Elgato was in “crisis mode.”

For around a decade, the German video capture company had been selling its TV tuners to people who wanted to watch and record live television via a connected computer. But by 2010, it was clear that the market for such devices was disappearing fast. On one side, broadcast TV was becoming increasingly encrypted, limiting what Elgato’s devices could do. On the other, the streaming revolution, led by Netflix and YouTube, was cutting out the humble TV tuner entirely.

“You’re on a sinking ship, you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do,” recalls Elgato’s Julian Fest, whose parents originally founded the company in 1999.

Elgato started to take a hard look at its business, and it noticed one number that didn’t quite make sense.

Elgato knew how many TV tuners it had sold, but people had been registering far more copies of the company’s EyeTV recording software than its own customers would need. When it emailed those customers, it found out they were using a rival piece of hardware, the Hauppauge HD-PVR — and not to record broadcast TV. They were recording gameplay from their PlayStations to put up on YouTube. Right under Elgato’s nose was a new market opportunity.

Armed with over a decade’s worth of video encoding knowledge from its TV tuner days, a direct connection to Hauppauge’s customers, and Hauppauge’s own quarterly earnings reports to know just how many HD-PVRs it sold, Elgato decided to release a rival capture product specifically tailored to gamers. The result was the Game Capture HD, released in 2012.

Three years later, when Fest took over as Elgato’s general manager, it seemed clear that the market for online gameplay videos was poised to explode. With Amazon acquiring the live streaming service Twitch for almost $1 billion in 2014, Fest was on the lookout for ways Elgato could double down. Perhaps it could offer a way to not just capture gameplay footage but also to help Twitch streamers control their broadcasts in the moment.

“If you looked at the state of Twitch and live streaming at the end of 2015, it was intriguing, but it was also kind of boring,” Fest tells The Verge. “Everybody’s stream was like, ‘Here’s my gameplay, here’s my webcam,’ and that’s it.” He figured that simplicity was because of all the different jobs a streamer has to handle during broadcasts: between playing the game, reading the chat, and entertaining an audience, it’d be difficult to also run a dynamic broadcast filled with changing layouts and eye-catching transitions.

Unless, Fest thought, there was a way to offer advanced broadcast controls without distracting a streamer from other tasks. The company found its answer in a popular German TV show where the host had a so-called “nipple board” of buttons in front of him, built into a giant desk. “Every time you pressed one of these buttons, it would play a funny clip that his team had found on TV,” Fest recalls. The team wondered if Elgato could use a similar array of buttons to control a livestream.

Elgato had its idea — now, it needed to find the right buttons to make it a reality.

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Art Lebedev had never intended to make a massive splash in the keyboard business. Timur Burbaev, who served as the keyboard’s industrial designer, tells The Verge that the initial idea came about shortly after he joined in 2003. The keyboard was just meant to be a concept, similar to its Lavatrix washing machine, to show off the studio’s design chops and drum up more business in the free time between projects.

In July 2005, the company released a series of concept images of what it called the “Optimus keyboard.” It had the same basic layout as a full-size computer keyboard but with a twist: “Every key of the Optimus keyboard is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at this very moment,” the website still reads.

One image shows how the keys could change to show an array of Photoshop tools; another shows dedicated controls for Quake. (This was 2005, after all.) On the left edge of the keyboard are macro keys that can be programmed to open specific programs, illustrated with a series of delightfully 2005-era logos like Internet Explorer and QuickTime. Although the images are renders rather than real photographs, the close-ups make an effort to show individual pixels present on the screens of the keys, a small imperfection that provides a tantalizing hint of reality. Nearly two decades later, the imaginary device still looks fantastic.

It was hard to ignore the amount of interest the design was getting. The team called an emergency meeting to discuss. “Back then, we just realized that if you get such a positive response, then let’s risk it and just produce it,” Burbaev says. It was “a clear indication” that the team should try and make it for real. The long and difficult journey of producing what would become the Optimus Maximus had begun. “No one imagined how much time and energy and especially investment it would take,” Burbaev says.

A big early decision was working out what kind of screen technology to use. The first iPod with a color display had only just been released, and the iPhone had yet to make its debut. Candybar-style phones like the Nokia 1110 and Motorola C139 reigned supreme. Art Lebedev thought LCD screens of the era were too dim and offered terrible black levels, while E Ink screens had terrible response times and no backlighting at all. OLED seemed like the best choice.

But this was long before OLED displays were routinely shipping in mainstream smartwatches, smartphones, and TVs. “The problem with OLED displays was that you could potentially find such a small OLED display in 2006 but a) it would cost you a fortune and b) it would have a massive resolution,” Burbaev says. They were meant for military users to show tactical information like maps on tiny screens, not Quake icons on a keyboard.

Art Lebedev decided its “only option” was to dive headfirst into the OLED display business. Burbaev believes his was one of the first companies to ship a product with these kinds of small, low-cost, low-resolution OLED screens. Doing so involved placing what Burbaev describes as a “very strange” order with a Taiwanese manufacturer with some prior experience. He adds that two managers from Art Lebedev ended up living in Taiwan for half a year while they were being made.

Not only did Art Lebedev need to find screens small enough to fit under each of its keys but it also needed to find a way for them to coexist with keys that you could actually type on. The final keyboard ended up being a bit of a fudge: the screens didn’t actually move. Instead, the company built a moving plastic keycap that moved around each screen. But even this solution had its challenges, Burbaev says. This plastic keycap needed to not only be transparent enough to show the display but also tinted enough to not reveal the ugly inner mechanism of each screen and durable enough to withstand scratches.

All of this meant the development process for the Optimus Maximus was long and difficult, and Wired featured the keyboard not once but twice in its annual vaporware roundups. Art Lebedev was unusually open about the troubled development process, cataloging its progress making the keyboard on a LiveJournal blog. We’re used to receiving such updates in an era of Kickstarter and crowdfunding, but the approach felt novel at the time — and it shows just how slowly development went. It took months just to arrive on a keycap design, studying various possibilities along the way. The company’s first OLED manufacturer went bust before managing to deliver its pricy $10 keys, forcing Art Lebedev to hunt down a new Taiwanese supplier.

Finally, after years of development, hundreds of preorders, and dozens upon dozens of blog posts and concept images hyping up every aspect of the idea, the Optimus Maximus began shipping in February 2008.

What was this legendary keyboard actually like to use? In a word: “Terrible.”

“Let’s put it this way, we sit around and type all day long and this thing wore us out in about 30 seconds to a minute,” Engadget wrote after its first few weeks of testing. “The Optimus Maximus is terrible for touch-typing,” CNET concurred in its July 2008 review, noting that “the tightly packed keys make for lots of mistaken presses, and the mushy responsiveness slows down your words per minute.” In 2018, retro keyboard YouTuber Chyrosran22 called the keys “fishy fuck nuggets with a capital F” that are “extremely terrible” to type on.

These are issues that would be hard to forgive on any keyboard, but the Optimus Maximus also carried a $1,600 price tag in 2008 (north of $2,200 in today’s money). At that price, it had to be perfect, and the reality was far from it.

So Art Lebedev came up with another, cheaper way to make screen-filled keys work: one big screen. In 2012, it released the Optimus Popularis, a more compact keyboard that placed one large LCD display under all its transparent keys, with no need for any individual OLED screens or mechanical switches underneath. Instead, you’d type on lenses that would activate the keyboard’s single large screen, with each lens held floating in place by an aluminum frame. This basic idea is the key to every LCD keyboard we’ve seen since, from the Elgato Stream Deck to Razer’s discontinued Switchblade UI to the Finalmouse Centerpiece.

Yet fundamental problems remained. Not only was Art Lebedev’s new keyboard only slightly cheaper (it still cost north of $1,000) but also the Optimus Popularis was an absolute pig to type on. Art Lebedev was kind enough to send one to us for the purposes of this story, and we had ambitions to write this entire piece on the Popularis. But after half an hour, we gave up. It was a struggle getting the keyboard to register keypresses in the first place. Its space bar, in particular, is a nightmare that refuses to actuate unless you press it firmly enough in exactly the right spot, which is nearly impossible if you want to type at any sort of speed.

Even in 2024, in an era of phones that are not just smart but that can literally fold in half, we still find ourselves wishing Art Lebedev had been able to deliver on its 2005 concept images. It’s a really beautiful idea with huge amounts of promise. But even if Art Lebedev never truly delivered, it did a lot of the vital iteration to get there.

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Four years after the Optimus Popularis’ failure, a strikingly similar gadget appeared on Indiegogo. The “Infinitton” contained just 15 individually customizable LCD keys, much like another old Art Lebedev concept dubbed the Optimus Aux. But this time, gadget lovers didn’t praise the idea to high heaven — the keypad missed its first crowdfunding goal of $30,000 and barely made that money a year later on Kickstarter.

But for Taiwanese manufacturer iDisplay, the Infinitton was far from a disappointment — it was a decade-old idea finally paying off.

That’s because iDisplay was the company that built those OLED and LCD keys for Art Lebedev all those years ago, the Russian design firm and Elgato both confirmed to The Verge. It never stopped working on them. “The success of Optimus Maximus kept me interested to continue the research and development of the built-in screen keys,” iDisplay cofounder Jen Wen Sun tells us via translated email. By 2017, he’d racked up over a dozen patents on the tech and says he sold the screens into broadcast equipment, airplanes, and cars along the way.

The company was originally formed in 1998 and worked on buttons for the gambling industry, he tells us, surviving off small-scale R&D projects while he kept trying to sell casinos on his push-button screens. Casino owner Bally’s was once interested, he says, but a deal never panned out.

Back in Germany, the Infinitton caught the attention of Elgato’s Julian Fest, who was researching how to turn his screen-equipped streaming controller idea into a reality. “As we’re thinking about this controller, this crowdfunding campaign comes out and we’re looking at this box and we’re like ‘Oh, this is perfect. We need to talk to these guys,’” Fest recalls.

By the time Elgato started talking to iDisplay, the Taiwanese company had already solved many of the hardware challenges needed to turn a thousand dollar-plus keyboard into a relatively affordable $149 computer accessory. It could use small off-the-shelf screens similar to what you might find in a car’s infotainment system. And iDisplay had a simpler job on its hands crafting the Stream Deck’s bubble wrap-esque button feel because it didn’t have to worry about people needing to type at 50-plus words per minute. That feel had been crafted before Elgato ever touched it.

Elgato essentially turned the Infinitton into the Stream Deck. That first Stream Deck, Fest says, “was really just on a hardware level an iteration of what these guys did.” Look at the original Stream Deck next to the Infinitton, and the resemblance is clear; it’s the same three-by-five grid of buttons turned on its side and with a new housing. “We tried to keep it as simple as possible,” Fest says.

The way Fest describes it, the main thing Elgato brought to the table when it started working with iDisplay was focus. In its Kickstarter campaign for the Infinitton, iDisplay pitched the accessory to anyone and everyone. It was for designers, traders, and musicians. It was for architects, engineers, and programmers. It was for video designers and photographers and business professionals.

In contrast, Elgato knew exactly who it wanted its Stream Deck to be for: streamers. It held a six-month private beta to collect feedback from its intended users, and it poured a lot of effort into making sure the device integrated nicely with OBS, the industry-standard streaming software. “The big new component then was building software that was tailor made for live streamers,” Fest says. “What we did is we took something existing and just repositioned it for an audience that actually understood and appreciated what this thing could do.”

That’s not to say Elgato didn’t have any challenges to overcome while developing the Stream Deck with iDisplay. Fest says a big one was ensuring that the Stream Deck could not only send information to a computer but also receive it back and show it to the user. Without being able to stay in sync like this, the Stream Deck risked being the glorified macro pad that critics claimed it was. “If you fire off a hotkey, you don’t know if that action succeeded,” Fest says. “What we wanted to ensure is that if you change a scene in OBS you can clearly see on your device [that] that scene is now active and the other one is not. Or if you mute yourself, you’re muted, and we can guarantee that you’re muted because we’re talking natively to OBS.”

The approach worked. iDisplay had sold just a few hundred units of its Infinitton via its crowdfunding campaigns, but the Stream Deck quickly became a staple of the Twitch streamer’s toolkit after its release in 2017. A year later, Corsair acquired Elgato for an undisclosed sum — and in 2022, it bought iDisplay, locking down its LCD keys.

Other companies have taken notice. In 2022, Razer introduced the Stream Controller, and a year after that, competing PC accessory manufacturer Logitech snatched up Loupedeck, which had worked with Razer on the rival streaming accessory.

Much like when it morphed its TV tuner into a game recorder, Elgato developed an audience for a technology rather than the other way around. It had been the missing piece of the puzzle since the beginning. But ironically, the audience for the Stream Deck has since expanded almost as wide as the one iDisplay hoped would embrace the Infinitton.

Fest says he knows of Stream Decks being used in the hundreds by organizations ranging from call centers to police dispatcher services. The UK’s Virgin Atlantic airline uses dozens of Stream Decks to simplify communications with pilots and air traffic controllers. Even SpaceX was an early customer, Fest says. (SpaceX did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.) The simple genius of the Stream Deck is that it made LCD keys peripheral, useful for anything where you need a button that dynamically advertises what it’s doing.

Art Lebedev was right about one thing: there was indeed a market of people prepared to pay top dollar for premium-quality keyboards. But in retrospect, the Russian design studio bet that the market would go in the opposite direction of the one it actually went in. Instead of a software-based future filled with screens, keyboards embraced hardware, rediscovering mechanical key switches that had been around since the ’80s. Users began fixating on typing feel, seeking out tactile switches and clacky keycaps. The many compromises of LCD keys might have been too much to ask.

But Elgato didn’t need to find a balance between typing feel and screen because its Stream Deck aimed to complement a traditional keyboard, rather than replace it. “Everybody has opinions on how Stream Deck’s keys feel. Some absolutely love it. Some say it’s way too mushy. But for everybody, it’s usable,” Fest says. You can forgive a key that feels mushy if you only need to press it to mute yourself while streaming.

Which is not to say there’s no space for the kind of screen-based design that Art Lebedev and iDisplay worked to create. The gaming accessories company Finalmouse appears to be banking on exactly that with its forthcoming Centerpiece keyboard, which draws on the single-screen approach of the Popularis but combines it with a set of actual mechanical switches — translucent ones — to retain the feel of a mechanical keyboard.

Like the Optimus Maximus, the Centerpiece has already blown past its first promised ship dates and is entering the vaporware realm. But if it does arrive, perhaps function and form will finally be aligned.

As for Art Lebedev, it doesn’t consider the Optimus keyboard a failure. “You could argue how successful the project was in terms of return on investment,” Burbaev says, telling us how much business it drummed up for the studio even a decade later. Sometimes a new client would admit that they, too, were fixated by those concept images back when they were a kid.