The sort of folks who are excited by mechanical keyboards tend to be a strange lot. Even by those standards, the Finalmouse Centerpiece is a strange piece of tech. It’s a complete mechanical keyboard, sure, but it’s also a display. And powering that display is an actual PC built into the wonderfully-clacky peripheral.
The display isn’t really intended for gaming or anything other than visual impressiveness, though we have no doubt that someone will play Doom on it immediately. Instead, these are so-called ‘Interactive Skins’. It’s exactly what it sounds like — animations on the keyboard that respond to user touch.
Quite the Centerpiece
And since the Centerpiece is a mechanical keyboard, it’ll be touched often. Whether anyone else likes it or not. Interactive Skins are powered by Unreal Engine 5 but there’s no information on how they’re being displayed on the keyboard. The display lives underneath a set of clear keycaps – but size, resolution, and all that other handy info are under wraps for now.
And the undoubtedly limited-edition keyboard won’t even hammer your GPU in order to do its thing. The Centrepiece has its own CPU and GPU inside, so it should function independently of whatever it’s connected to. It should, in theory, work even if its host PC is powered off, as long as the keyboard has power.
For the mechanical keyboard nerds out there, the switches used for this wonder of technology are based on Gateron’s Ink Black switches. The specs have been slightly tweaked for this edition and the 60g of actuating force and 4mm of travel have been subtly changed. Finalmouse hasn’t said how. There’s also something called a Laminated DisplayCircuit Glass Stack under the keys, presumably helping to keep things transparent. A thumpy mechanical keyboard and glass don’t seem to go together but hey, maybe it’ll work.
If you want one as a Centerpiece for your gaming rig, it’ll cost you about R6,000 ($350) when it goes on sale next year. Which… isn’t nearly as expensive as we were expecting.
Source: Finalmouse