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

The journey to create the Optimus Maximus would take years and finish in a number of business failures. However Artwork Lebedev’s imaginative and prescient and the expertise created alongside the way in which would stay on and finally discover widespread success — a hit that’s been hidden inside one other common product: Elgato’s Stream Deck, a small desktop accent lined in morphing, full-color keys.

By the point Elgato got here to launch its first Stream Deck in 2017, Artwork Lebedev’s Optimus keyboards had light into historical past. However there’s extra linking the 2 units than a core thought. In reality, the Stream Deck {hardware} got here from exactly the identical firm that developed the Optimus Maximus’ keys. In a really actual sense, Artwork Lebedev’s work laid the foundations for what Elgato would go on to create.

Armed with over a decade’s price of video encoding information from its TV tuner days, a direct connection to Hauppauge’s prospects, and Hauppauge’s personal quarterly earnings experiences to know simply what number of HD-PVRs it offered, Elgato determined to launch a rival seize product particularly tailor-made to avid gamers. The end result was the Sport Seize HD, launched in 2012. 

Three years later, when Fest took over as Elgato’s normal supervisor, it appeared clear that the marketplace for on-line gameplay movies was poised to blow up. With Amazon buying the stay streaming service Twitch for nearly $1 billion in 2014, Fest was looking out for methods Elgato may double down. Maybe it may provide a technique to not simply seize gameplay footage but additionally to assist Twitch streamers management their broadcasts within the second.

“In the event you appeared on the state of Twitch and stay streaming on the finish of 2015, it was intriguing, but it surely was additionally sort of boring,” Fest tells The Verge. “Everyone’s stream was like, ‘Right here’s my gameplay, right here’s my webcam,’ and that’s it.” He figured that simplicity was due to all of the totally different jobs a streamer has to deal with throughout broadcasts: between taking part in the sport, studying the chat, and entertaining an viewers, it’d be tough to additionally run a dynamic broadcast full of altering layouts and crowd pleasing transitions.

Until, Fest thought, there was a technique to provide superior broadcast controls with out distracting a streamer from different duties. The corporate discovered its reply in a preferred German TV present the place the host had a so-called “nipple board” of buttons in entrance of him, constructed into a large desk. “Each time you pressed one in all these buttons, it could play a humorous clip that his staff had discovered on TV,” Fest remembers. The staff questioned if Elgato may use an analogous array of buttons to manage a livestream.

Elgato had its thought — now, it wanted to search out the correct buttons to make it a actuality. 

One picture exhibits how the keys may change to indicate an array of Photoshop instruments; one other exhibits devoted controls for Quake. (This was 2005, in spite of everything.) On the left fringe of the keyboard are macro keys that may be programmed to open particular packages, illustrated with a collection of delightfully 2005-era logos like Web Explorer and QuickTime. Though the pictures are renders quite than actual pictures, the close-ups make an effort to indicate particular person pixels current on the screens of the keys, a small imperfection that gives a tantalizing trace of actuality. Practically twenty years later, the imaginary gadget nonetheless seems unbelievable.

It was exhausting to disregard the quantity of curiosity the design was getting. The staff known as an emergency assembly to debate. “Again then, we simply realized that for those who get such a optimistic response, then let’s threat it and simply produce it,” Burbaev says. It was “a transparent indication” that the staff ought to attempt to make it for actual. The lengthy and tough journey of manufacturing what would turn out to be the Optimus Maximus had begun. “Nobody imagined how a lot time and vitality and particularly funding it could take,” Burbaev says. 

An enormous early choice was understanding what sort of display expertise to make use of. The primary iPod with a coloration show had solely simply been launched, and the iPhone had but to make its debut. Candybar-style telephones just like the Nokia 1110 and Motorola C139 reigned supreme. Artwork Lebedev thought LCD screens of the period had been too dim and supplied horrible black ranges, whereas E Ink screens had horrible response occasions and no backlighting in any respect. OLED appeared like the only option.

However this was lengthy earlier than OLED shows had been routinely transport in mainstream smartwatches, smartphones, and TVs. “The issue with OLED shows was that you would doubtlessly discover such a small OLED show in 2006 however a) it could price you a fortune and b) it could have an enormous decision,” Burbaev says. They had been meant for navy customers to indicate tactical data like maps on tiny screens, not Quake icons on a keyboard.

Artwork Lebedev determined its “solely choice” was to dive headfirst into the OLED show enterprise. Burbaev believes his was one of many first firms to ship a product with these sorts of small, low-cost, low-resolution OLED screens. Doing so concerned putting what Burbaev describes as a “very unusual” order with a Taiwanese producer with some prior expertise. He provides that two managers from Artwork Lebedev ended up dwelling in Taiwan for half a yr whereas they had been being made.

Not solely did Artwork Lebedev want to search out screens sufficiently small to suit underneath every of its keys but it surely additionally wanted to discover a approach for them to coexist with keys that you would truly sort on. The ultimate keyboard ended up being a little bit of a fudge: the screens didn’t truly transfer. As an alternative, the corporate constructed a shifting plastic keycap that moved round every display. However even this resolution had its challenges, Burbaev says. This plastic keycap wanted to not solely be clear sufficient to indicate the show but additionally tinted sufficient to not reveal the ugly inside mechanism of every display and sturdy sufficient to face up to scratches.

All of this meant the event course of for the Optimus Maximus was lengthy and tough, and Wired featured the keyboard not as soon as however twice in its annual vaporware roundups. Artwork Lebedev was unusually open in regards to the troubled improvement course of, cataloging its progress making the keyboard on a LiveJournal weblog. We’re used to receiving such updates in an period of Kickstarter and crowdfunding, however the method felt novel on the time — and it exhibits simply how slowly improvement went. It took months simply to reach on a keycap design, learning numerous potentialities alongside the way in which. The corporate’s first OLED producer went bust earlier than managing to ship its pricy $10 keys, forcing Artwork Lebedev to seek out a brand new Taiwanese provider. 

Lastly, after years of improvement, a whole lot of preorders, and dozens upon dozens of weblog posts and idea photographs hyping up each facet of the thought, the Optimus Maximus started transport in February 2008.

What was this legendary keyboard truly like to make use of? In a phrase: “Horrible.”

“Let’s put it this manner, we sit round and kind all day lengthy and this factor wore us out in about 30 seconds to a minute,” Engadget wrote after its first few weeks of testing. “The Optimus Maximus is horrible for touch-typing,” CNET concurred in its July 2008 evaluate, noting that “the tightly packed keys make for many mistaken presses, and the mushy responsiveness slows down your phrases per minute.” In 2018, retro keyboard YouTuber Chyrosran22 known as the keys “fishy fuck nuggets with a capital F” which might be “extraordinarily horrible” to sort on. 

These are points that may be exhausting to forgive on any keyboard, however the Optimus Maximus additionally carried a $1,600 price ticket in 2008 (north of $2,200 in right now’s cash). At that value, it needed to be good, and the fact was removed from it.

So Artwork Lebedev got here up with one other, cheaper technique to make screen-filled keys work: one huge display. In 2012, it launched the Optimus Popularis, a extra compact keyboard that positioned one giant LCD show underneath all its clear keys, without having for any particular person OLED screens or mechanical switches beneath. As an alternative, you’d sort on lenses that may activate the keyboard’s single giant display, with every lens held floating in place by an aluminum body. This fundamental thought is the important thing to each LCD keyboard we’ve seen since, from the Elgato Stream Deck to Razer’s discontinued Switchblade UI to the Finalmouse Centerpiece. 

But elementary issues remained. Not solely was Artwork Lebedev’s new keyboard solely barely cheaper (it nonetheless price north of $1,000) but additionally the Optimus Popularis was an absolute pig to sort on. Artwork Lebedev was sort sufficient to ship one to us for the needs of this story, and we had ambitions to write down this whole piece on the Popularis. However after half an hour, we gave up. It was a wrestle getting the keyboard to register keypresses within the first place. Its area bar, particularly, is a nightmare that refuses to actuate except you press it firmly sufficient in precisely the correct spot, which is sort of not possible if you wish to sort at any kind of velocity.

Even in 2024, in an period of telephones that aren’t simply good however that may actually fold in half, we nonetheless discover ourselves wishing Artwork Lebedev had been in a position to ship on its 2005 idea photographs. It’s a extremely stunning thought with large quantities of promise. However even when Artwork Lebedev by no means really delivered, it did quite a lot of the very important iteration to get there.

However for Taiwanese producer iDisplay, the Infinitton was removed from a disappointment — it was a decade-old thought lastly paying off. 

That’s as a result of iDisplay was the corporate that constructed these OLED and LCD keys for Artwork Lebedev all these years in the past, the Russian design agency and Elgato each confirmed to The Verge. It by no means stopped engaged on them. “The success of Optimus Maximus stored me to proceed the analysis and improvement of the built-in display keys,” iDisplay cofounder Jen Wen Solar tells us by way of translated e mail. By 2017, he’d racked up over a dozen patents on the tech and says he offered the screens into broadcast tools, airplanes, and vehicles alongside the way in which.

The corporate was initially fashioned in 1998 and labored on buttons for the playing {industry}, he tells us, surviving off small-scale R&D initiatives whereas he stored making an attempt to promote casinos on his push-button screens. On line casino proprietor Bally’s was as soon as , he says, however a deal by no means panned out.

Again in Germany, the Infinitton caught the eye of Elgato’s Julian Fest, who was researching flip his screen-equipped streaming controller thought right into a actuality. “As we’re serious about this controller, this crowdfunding marketing campaign comes out and we’re taking a look at this field and we’re like ‘Oh, that is good. We have to speak to those guys,’” Fest remembers. 

By the point Elgato began speaking to iDisplay, the Taiwanese firm had already solved most of the {hardware} challenges wanted to show a thousand dollar-plus keyboard into a comparatively reasonably priced $149 laptop accent. It may use small off-the-shelf screens just like what you may discover in a automobile’s infotainment system. And iDisplay had an easier job on its fingers crafting the Stream Deck’s bubble wrap-esque button really feel as a result of it didn’t have to fret about folks needing to sort at 50-plus phrases per minute. That really feel had been crafted earlier than Elgato ever touched it.

Elgato basically turned the Infinitton into the Stream Deck. That first Stream Deck, Fest says, “was actually simply on a {hardware} stage an iteration of what these guys did.” Have a look at the unique Stream Deck subsequent to the Infinitton, and the resemblance is obvious; it’s the identical three-by-five grid of buttons turned on its aspect and with a brand new housing. “We tried to maintain it so simple as doable,” Fest says. 

The way in which Fest describes it, the principle factor Elgato dropped at the desk when it began working with iDisplay was focus. In its Kickstarter marketing campaign for the Infinitton, iDisplay pitched the accent to anybody and everybody. It was for designers, merchants, and musicians. It was for architects, engineers, and programmers. It was for video designers and photographers and enterprise professionals. 

In distinction, Elgato knew precisely who it wished its Stream Deck to be for: streamers. It held a six-month personal beta to gather suggestions from its supposed customers, and it poured quite a lot of effort into ensuring the gadget built-in properly with OBS, the industry-standard streaming software program. “The large new part then was constructing software program that was tailor made for stay streamers,” Fest says. “What we did is we took one thing current and simply repositioned it for an viewers that truly understood and appreciated what this factor may do.”

That’s to not say Elgato didn’t have any challenges to beat whereas growing the Stream Deck with iDisplay. Fest says a giant one was guaranteeing that the Stream Deck couldn’t solely ship data to a pc but additionally obtain it again and present it to the consumer. With out having the ability to keep in sync like this, the Stream Deck risked being the glorified macro pad that critics claimed it was. “In the event you fireplace off a hotkey, you don’t know if that motion succeeded,” Fest says. “What we wished to make sure is that for those who change a scene in OBS you’ll be able to clearly see in your gadget [that] that scene is now energetic and the opposite one is just not. Or for those who mute your self, you’re muted, and we are able to assure that you just’re muted as a result of we’re speaking natively to OBS.”

The method labored. iDisplay had offered just some hundred items of its Infinitton by way of its crowdfunding campaigns, however the Stream Deck shortly grew to become a staple of the Twitch streamer’s toolkit after its launch in 2017. A yr later, Corsair acquired Elgato for an undisclosed sum — and in 2022, it purchased iDisplay, locking down its LCD keys.

Different firms have taken discover. In 2022, Razer launched the Stream Controller, and a yr after that, competing PC accent producer Logitech snatched up Loupedeck, which had labored with Razer on the rival streaming accent. 

Very like when it morphed its TV tuner right into a recreation recorder, Elgato developed an viewers for a expertise quite than the opposite approach round. It had been the lacking piece of the puzzle because the starting. However paradoxically, the viewers for the Stream Deck has since expanded nearly as large because the one iDisplay hoped would embrace the Infinitton. 

Fest says he is aware of of Stream Decks getting used within the a whole lot by organizations starting from name facilities to police dispatcher companies. The UK’s Virgin Atlantic airline makes use of dozens of Stream Decks to simplify communications with pilots and air visitors controllers. Even SpaceX was an early buyer, Fest says. (SpaceX didn’t reply to The Verge’s request for remark.) The easy genius of the Stream Deck is that it made LCD keys peripheral, helpful for something the place you want a button that dynamically advertises what it’s doing.