There’s no shortage of gaming keyboards aimed at everyone from home-bound gamers to traveling e-sports pros alike. While they come with different switches, lighting, and various fancy elements, they all tend to come in the exact same single-piece traditional layout. The Dygma Raise wants to change that.
Billed as “an ergonomic keyboard for e-sports,” the peripheral sports a two-piece design that aims to improve “performance, health, and comfort for gamers.” We know, every other gaming keyboard is marketed the same way, but the split design, unique layout, and fully-programmable keys does sound a lot more promising than most gaming keyboards we’ve seen.
The split design of the Dygma Raise allows you to get a more compact keyboard that you can position at a diagonal angle, allowing you to keep your wrists in a neutral position to decrease pressure and reduce strain. That means better ergonomics for both hands and wrists, all while reducing internal shoulder rotation, whether you’re playing left-handed, playing right-handed, or typing one of your long diatribes on Facebook. The compact profile also makes it easy to use your mouse in close proximity to the keyboard, so you don’t need to reach out to use your navigation tool, while magnet connectors make it easy to snap both sides on and off without much trouble.
It retains the traditional layout for the keys, albeit with shorter space bars on either split. Those shorter space bars allow the keyboard to add an extra period key next to the space, with four thumb keys under the space bar enabling all new controls. Key layouts on either split are nearly symmetrical, by the way, so the gameplay experience should be nearly the same whether you’re left- or right-handed, so long as you rebind the keys correctly. You can even take out the left-side key caps and swap them into the switches on the right side if you’re strictly using it for left-handed gaming.
Each split of the Dygma Raise comes with a huge palmrest that elevates the wrist, further increasing comfort and improving the angle of your hand. Seriously, the darn things are so big, I thought they were trackpads. All keys come with RGB backlighting and underglow, so you can make your keyboard look like the controls of a futuristic spaceship. You can program the LEDs anyway you want, so you can make it shine in all sorts of color combinations, with the option to assign color combos for each mapped layout, allowing it to serve as a visual indicator.
You can choose to equip the keyboard with one of three Cherry MX switches or four Kailh switches, so you can get exactly the right kind of sound and feel for your keyboard. Features include a solid aluminum body for lightweight durability, true N-key rollover (works equally well on Windows, Macs, and Linux PCs), and a single USB slot for plugging in extra peripherals.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Dygma Raise. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at €165.