When I saw the Wooting One on Kickstarter it was something I really thought I wanted. The world's first Analog mechanical keyboard.
What is a mechanical analog Keyboard?
To start what separates a mechanical keyboard from a regular keyboard are high quality typically spring switches. The Wooting One uses what are called "Optical switches" which means there is a sensor and light to read the position of the keypress.
Basically different pressure sensitivities on the key relates to various increments of movement. For example with the analog stick on a traditional game controller, you find on Playstation or Xbox or a Wii nunchuck how far you tilt it will effect whether a character walks or runs. Usually in PC games that type of movement would require pressing shift or another key and your movement direction since all keyboards are digital. They only understand on or off.
With the Wooting One in theory you should be able to have incremental joystick like movement for walking, running, driving, flying by using light key presses and hard key presses.
Effectively a hybrid between a controller and keyboard. The precision of mouse aiming and pointing with smooth movements controllers allow.
Even better it could be your ONLY controller. With it's unassuming looks you could easily take it to work, school, travel or church without anyone even thinking you were planning on gaming.
So I put my money down and it arrived today so here I am to give you an in depth review!
First unboxing it!
It comes shipped in this minimalist black box that's easy to open with one flap.
Inside you will find the keyboard itself along with a plastic protector.
once you remove the keyboard you will find a micro USB cable it uses to connect to the PC. (For cable management the keyboard itself has three rails underneath for any route you need.) You will also find what Wooting calls "a first aid kit" with extra screws keycaps and a keycap extractor. Finally we have the instructions.
But you can just plug it in and you are ready to go!
It has full individual RGB backlighting.
Onto it's aspects as a keyboard:
I feel it is very well made, very sturdy and it looks really good out of the box! The red linear switches are super smooth, I'm using the blues at home which is even smoother but with blue switches you get their signature clicking.
It's not just the switches that are customizable and modular though, the keycaps, faceplate, stabilizers, can all be swapped out to the users preferences. Even better with the Wooting software you can customize actuation points. Between my current sets of keys and customizing actuation it's like I have 3 of my favorite keyboards on hand. Needless to say the typing experience is wonderful for writers and programmers.
As shipped it does come with some bad stabilizer rattles and noticeable ping this is a very loud keyboard but that's easily fixed with modification.
Someone that just casually uses a keyboard out of the box might find all of this overkill though.
The Wooting One starts at $159 with a premium version with a set of extra witches costing $200 which is a pretty overkill price and something to take into consideration.
Now on to gaming. The Wooting one shines when it comes to driving and flying games but not much else.
This keyboard has a huge learning curve and even those experienced with mouse & keyboard as well as controllers will need to relearn games due to the fact that pressing a key requires far less force than moving a joystick. Not bottoming out is a matter of focus.
That makes in unsuitable in my opinion for twitch action games like Counterstrike, however I could see a Hanzo main in Overwatch appreciating the ability to peek.
In open world games that switch between driving, flying and walking the cracks really start to show in how everything is set up.
The keyboard has a digital mode where it will be a standard keyboard and a press of the mode button will switch to one of three analog profiles. In order to use one analog profile properly you have to unbind the standard wasd keys in game. All of this can become cumbersome.
Just as one example playing GTAV there is no analog input for walking so the best course of action is to use the digital keyboard controls. There are analog inputs for driving and flying though. But they require different keys so I would use digital mode for walking then when getting into a car press the mode button then function key down for that set of analog controls, get out remembering to press the mode button again to switch back to digital run to a plane, then press mode to switch to digital and then function key and right to switch to those flying controls. Imagine thinking of all of that during a heist while shooting.
Some games don't allow analog xinput style controls and mouse & keyboard inputs at the same time making the device futile.
As mentioned the majority of games already have the walk key bound so it's difficult to imagine gamers wanting to relearn a game this way.
Where it does shine though are driving games. Coming with a profile I suspect was built around rocket league it does play great. Forza is a lot better too than playing on a standard keyboard.
Still at $150-$200 you could easily buy some decent sim driving wheels or flight sim joysticks if that's the only purpose. A $50 xbox controller solves every problem involving analog movement.
Is this the future of PC Gaming? Not yet. Right now it just feels over-engineered and requires users to take part in that engineering. Not without more profiles, easier use, support by developers and some killer apps that show it off rather than being kinda good in a hackey way in a few games could I call it the future rather than a step in the right direction.
If you're the type of person to spend this much on a mechanical keyboard anyways check it out! It's as solid as the rest and has some cool features that might work in some games you play and it looks like they are always working to improve! They call this "feature proof" since due to it's customization you can download firmware updates and buy new switches when they are available.
I think there's more applications to this technology than gaming. Having analogue input means that you can map motion accurately according to key input, and software could even detect when a key press is accidental and when it is intentional based on the force you used to depress it. Autocorrect in Word based on how you pressed a key? Yes please. I'm also going to mess around with it with some of my DJ software. Ultimately it's going to be software that makes or breaks this but for now it's very experimental and up to you if you want to pay the early adopter tax/gamble.