Airborne Mouse

edpin writes "CNN is reporting this new mouse that works without a surface. You hold the device in your hand and tilt it to where on screen you want it to go. It uses a similar technique to "rock and scroll" developed by Compaq (now HP) a while ago."

Hate to rain on the protest march...

[ShooterNeo]

But is this really any more accurate than, say, a joystick? The advantage of a mouse is that mouse movements by your hand map directly to your screen. With practice you can just move it and get very close to the desired point. A joystick like device lets you control the rate of change of pointer position, not the position directly itself. While useful for some things, for aiming my railgun or getting work done this gadget is junk.

Even better - the Tilt-Sensor Palm

[soboroff]

Several years ago, Till Harbaum [harbaum.org] added a tilt sensor [harbaum.org] to his Palm Pilot. Then he wrote Mulg, which is kinda like Marble Madness; if you have the sensor, you can play by tilting the Palm to roll the marble around.

This is STILL the all-time best Palm HW hack I've ever seen.

Re:9 hour charge?

[bpb213]

the same applies to any cordless technology.

For instance, you have to charge your cordless phone for 9 hours before use.
your cell phone gets charged for 8 i think hours before use.
rechargable PDA's get charged a couple hours before use.

So an initial charge time of 9 hours isnt really new in the electronics market.

And besides, you do it the first night, and forget about it.

Re:What kind of applications?

[mirko]

Exactly my point to : if we consider the mouse as a complement to the keyboard as an input, then they'd have to develop an airborne Keyboard to make this practical...
It's also true that the way they shaped the mouse (on the photo) doesn't make it look it is made to walk around while working.
So, now, one will have to invent a specific usage for this...
I can imagine some Mad Quakers fighting with this but they will then risk to hurt each others while quickly balancing their mouses to frag the other before being fragged...

Might be great, or useless

[Gerry Gleason]

Depends a lot on how well it is implemented. Implied in the write-up is that it might be hard to hold the pointer position while you click buttons, and they have an 'enable' trigger so you can freeze the position before clicking. Sounds like that might be cumbersome.

Better would be to start re-thinking some things more fundamentally. As you suggest, there are new degrees of freedom that could be used to enhance the interface for 3D control. The idea of 'gestures' could be very useful too, but you have to maintain compatibility both with people's familiarity with using mice, and the system and application support for mice.

I think it would be cooler if one of these could be strapped to your hand or wrist so you could still type on the keyboard without putting it down, and also access pointer functions more or less seemlessly. This needs some real hard core UI research and experimentation.

Re:Back in the 80s

[Andrewkov]

Mercury is very toxic .. I wouldn't like to see it used on a device such as this which has such a short life span (2 years or so?). There's a lot of talk going on now about banning mercury in automotive applications (mercury is used in switches, such as the ones that turn on a light when you open the hood).

Re:Hehe...

[Anonymous Coward]

And what button would you be clicking to delete your entire hard drive without a prompt?

This has been done before

[dragontooth]

My cousin had a really kick ass TV/Stereo Surround Sound system before everyone else did. His Sony TV used a gyroscopic mouse that was shaped like an egg. It did the exact same thing on his TV. Worked as a remote....and this was 6 years ago.

Re:sux

[Junta]

Read the article, this thing has an optical eye while on a surface, and uses gyroscopes when lifted and a special button pressed.