Engadget has created a video demonstration of the Optimus Maximus keyboard, a product of the design studio Art. Lebedev based in Russia.

When the keyboard runs through its boot sequence it seems to take a little while, but this will probably improve with firmware updates. Upon key initialization the colors are vibrant and the characters look crisp. Every key is fully customizable so you can easily create a visual mapping for a specific key to do a certain function. For example in his video Ryan Block creates a key with the Engadget logo.

One of the coolest things is how the keys change visually to respond to certain functions, for example hitting the caps lock key changes all the keys to either upper case or lower case, or hitting the key sequence to display symbols on the Mac shows all the special symbols in place of the standard characters.

The software that drives the keyboard is still in it’s early stages, it seems to be a bit buggy on the Mac, for example if your on a Mac you’ll need to manually open the driver in order to get Mac OS style keys to appear. Also the caps lock key doesn’t work.

The configuration application is especially cool. You can visually create new key mappings, in fact you can even use a image editor and create your own symbols to appear on the keys. Once you’ve created a custom key map you can apply it to specific applications. As you might expect you can change font faces, colors, and even the background color of each key, though it should be noted that the background color is actually a smaller square on the face of the key, and not the entire key itself.

From what I can see in the video demonstration this looks pretty cool. At this point it seems a bit pricey at $462.27 US Dollars. You can find out more by visiting the Art. Lebedev website.