WolfKing's Baffling Warrior Xxtreme Double Circle Keyboard
Surprise! A company named "WolfKing" puts out a weird product. This one is the "Warrior Xxtreme," a combination gamepad and keyboard. For a moment I tried to figure out how you would use the two circles full of keys as a gamepad, then realized that the gamepad is actually there in the middle. Why the keys are in a circle then is anyone's guess.*
It's supposedly tailored for MMO players, "eliminating the keys unneeded for gaming." Should you find yourself needless distracted by all those pesky keys on your normal keyboard, you can get a Warrior Xxtreme for $80.
WolfKing Launches WARRIOR XXTREME [BusinessWire.com via Engadget]
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If I could train myself to use that, I'd look so flipping awesome! However, like everything from Dvorak, to the N-52 to this...there's a massive learning curve before you get used to it, and then there's the problem of going back to anything else when you're not at home.
The left circle is optimized for FPS games. You'll want to keep your fingers on the WASD keys pretty much all of the time, press ZXC with your thumb (which is why they are larger here, together with enter), and never move your hand to a far away key like 9, because it can take you a second to find the WASD position again, and when playing an FPS, a second is an eternity. Hence, the numerical keys are grouped around the main keys in a tight circle here, with all of the function keys almost as close. The right half also being laid out in a circle is mostle done for symmetry, a design choice, I think.
Typing text would be quite a chore on this thing unless you've learned a whole new keyboard layout (which is _not_ necessary for playing games!), so I don't think it's geared towards MMOs at all. The rpess release doesn't mention MMOs. I have no idea why someone at Engadget wrote this is "supposedly tailored for MMO players" -- who in the world supposes so?
By the way, Joel, you should have put that part into a quote attributed to Darren Murph (the author over at Engadget) like a good journalist, instead of mindlessly and plagiarisingly parroting it. I demand you pedge betterment!
I agreed with the MMO idea or at the very least the FPS + chat theme, because once you learned this system, you could two hand all your controls. By the layout of the keyboard I'm assuming that the WASD and other keys on the left are NOT the same ID as the ones on the right. If that's true, then you can one-handed type your chat, while still doing all your action stuff with your left hand. If they are the same IDS, then it's utterly useless...and even still most games limit the "action" stuff you can do, when the chat bar is up.
Looks like you could almost type normally on it, except that the T on the left is way out of the area it should be in. The right-hand range is not too much unlike a one-hand keyboard I was idly scribbling in a notebook recently. (Recently enough that I would have been only the millionth person to think of it, I expect.)
I just realized that before I write what I wanted to say, I have to apologize and take back half of what I claimed above. WolfKing do in fact claim in the press release linked above that their new keyboard is suitable for MMORPGs; at least they mention MMOs in one place and RPGs in another. Which makes no sense -- as both one-handed and two-handed text-input are awkward, inconvenient, and slower than on WolfKing's own Wolf Claw -- but they did say it. *shrugs* Sorry. (I had grepped for the literal string "MMO", which doesn't occur ... boy that was stupid.)
Anon. (#3), the answer is in the linked press release:
It's a standard HID, plug-and-type. Worse, it looks like the "combination of gamepad and keyboard" statement is a lie. I'm not sure, as I couldn't find a review that addresses this, but it looks like it only has keyboard functionality; i.e. there's no way to make the WASD keys show up as a gamepad's d-pad on your computer, say, and the ZXC keys as gamepad buttons.
Now, as you noticed, some keys appear twice; the A, for example. Can two different keys have different IDs and still both produce an 'A', without special drivers? Nope.
The right-hand array contains the entire alphabet, but no numbers. The left-hand array has all the numbers and function keys, and some but not all of the letters of the alphabet.
Present: a c d e f g h m n q r s t w x z
Absent: b i j k l o p u v
It seems strange to have all the letters on the right and only some on the left, but it's a lot stranger to have the slighted letters -- i.e., the ones that appear only once -- include three out of five vowels.
Baffling? Don't you mean waffling?
Teresa, it looks to me like the keys on the left are the ones most likely to be used in gaming; 't' for example, is generally used to send a message to all other players in an FPS game, so you'd want that in a place that's easy to access.
I'm puzzled as to why they laid out the right half of the keyboard the way they did, though. You'd probably want to make it easier to type with just your left hand, so why not flip the bottom half around, similar to Randall Munroe's Mirrorboard?