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Mouse Begone: Use Head Movements And IR Instead
Gonzodoggy writes: "Saw this on my local news last night. There's a company in Oregon that is trying to eliminate the mouse as we know it. The company is called Naturalpoint. Basically, you place a reflective dot on your forehead or, for laptop users, a plastic ring on your finger. Then when you move your head or your finger, the mouse goes where you point. The demo on the news showed a gamer making the game look where he looked, allowing him to keep both hands on the keyboard" Looks like a cool idea, but very Windows only for now. So I guess I'll have to rig up a trackball underfoot, and just fool my housemates into thinking I was controlling the cursor with my changing glances.
well SHIT man, my wrist is so strong from, ahem, 'workin out'I think I'd have to agree
Hang a disco ball over your cube and just beam the ring into it... Have everyone in your office yelling in no time! :)
I sneezed and deleted my C:\WINDOWS directory!
My professors used to get pr0n on their video projection systems in front of the whole class. That was always fun.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
It'd be cool if it worked with an off-the-produce Banana sticker, instead of a high-tech dot.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
This unit'll make it tough to listen to any music with decent beat and use your computer at the same time. ``Sorry boss. How could I have known that listening to Nine Inch Nails would delete all the files in the source directories?''
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Ok, so the movements from your head correspond to the movements on the screen, presumably a FPS. Sounds like a great idea, but of course, the sensitivity of your movement needs to be amplified, like a mouse, so you can turn all the way around (180 deg.) without being the Exorcist chick.
:)
That's all fine and well, but many people have problems with motion sickness with FPS's - the generally accepted theory afaik is that if since your perceived vision doesn't correspond to your body movements, you're likely under the influence of a poison and start to feel ill. The only time you think you're moving when you're not tends to be under the influence of a lot poison - drink too much alcohol, room spins, makes you vomit, etc.
Imagine how much it would screw you up to turn your head 10 degrees and do a 360 - I imagine that this wouldn't be that far from normal usage, because you still need to be able to see the screen while you're doing all this head-wagging. Now you don't just have the discrepancy between movement and sight - you actually are moving your head and seeing your FOV change, but in a wildly exaggerated way, in both speed and accelleration.
I don't normally have any game sickness, but I think that would make me puke pretty quick. Oh yeah - also, picture what RSI would be like in a world where people used their heads as pointing devices instead of their hands
-lx
Wasn't there a story on this or something similar last week?
You say you want a revolution....
You call your boss honey?
Doesn't everybody?
This is not going to make it easy to click off the window downloading pr0n right as the boss walks in...
"No really honey, I wasn't looking at her, it just popped on the screen by a virus."
"uh huh"
I remember a serial device that you could get for your computer that did the same thing. This was back in 85-87 time frame. I know Stride Micro resold them to use with their Stride series boxes. You attached this box to the top of your terminal and it bounced an infrared signal off of a holographic patch you stuck on your head. It looked at the reflectance level. This then was used to control your cursor. I never bought one as I couldn't justify it. I think it was between $150 and $200, but my memory is foggy on stuff that far back.
Tribes 2 and sniping with this thing... hmmmmm. Would be interesting to see how accurate it is, I'd be worried that simple natural movements would cause me to end up shooting way off.. having to keep -perfectly still- while trying to aim at someone might be a little much.
BilldaCat
One fun prank with mice is to go to the computer lab and switch the cables for two adjacent computers. You sit at one computer with a mouse and wait for someone to sit next to you. Your mouse controls their cursor, and their mouse controls your cursor. You start out by watching what they are doing and trying to mimic their movements (and don't laugh!) Then you start randomly sliding one direction consistently, or moving to a different place on the screen whenever they look away. See how long it takes for them to figure it out!
Another fun time was when we discovered that by default our lab had X permissions for anyone in the lab to connect to any display. It was great fun sending "dialog boxes" to random users that told them weird things to do to "fix" the system. For example, "WARNING! Monitor Overheat. Your monitor is overheating, please turn it off and then back on before continuing." Or make a fake "ICQ" type message that purports to come from a cute girl also in the room - see if you can get the victim to go up to the cute girl and talk to her!
This is actually a pretty dumb idea. People move their eyes more than their heads. I have a 21" monitor and my head doesn't move at all as I look on the screen. What are they gonna do, have a prosthesis to prevent the eyeballs to move inside their sockets???
>Uh, when you look around on a monitor, do you >regularly move your head extremely fast?
That's because your usually moving your *eyes*, not your entire head. I don't know about you, but I'm not willing to stick thier little reflective dot on my eyeball...
that part in THHGTG...
"For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive -- you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular ependiture, of course, but meant you had to sit infuriatingly still is you wanted to keep listening to the same program."
truth is stranger than fiction, right?
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
Alright, now replacing the mouse with something that looks wherever you look is certainly cool, but this is not a promising solution. When I am using my computer, most of the time my head is stationary. It is my EYES that do the moving. It's going to get very tiring to precisely position my entire scull every time I want to move the mouse.
A better approch would be to follow my eye-movement in relation to my head and the monitor. This would require some pretty fancy cameras to get the detail level one would need, but it would be really cool, don't you think?
http://kered.org
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CitizenC
I turn my head to look around a corner in Quake, and suddenly... I am looking away from the monitor. This kind of gadget has been around for years in numerous incarnations (Even for the original Nintendo Entertainment System.) and always fails for the same reason: there is only one, small, stationary screen.
Beyond that, if you are sitting in one place, constantly moving one's head around to view parts of a screen is a bit annoying.
so, does that mean that when i am looking at nice pictures at home that my browser window is going to be jumping all around?
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
MAjor price difference though. $1000 for the older technology,
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
At least until they can put a sensor on my eyes. Personally, I don't move my head enough for this to work. Of course, it could be just me. All alone. By myself. An outcast. Hey, you don't need to rub it in! Why is everybody always picking on me?
India has had this 'technology' for centuries. As this photo proves.
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> but then again, while I'm reading a webpage, my mouse would continually
> be hovering over the text I'm reading.
Interesting point. But would it be true. After all, any object that doesn't move around on the retina vanishes. I'd read about his in a couple of text books, but never experienced it until I was trying to out-stare a dog. We were gazing at each other for several minutes when slowly my vision started to fade to grey. The scene on my retna hadn't changed, so it was compensating for what it thought was an optical artifact.
So if your eye-tracking mouse was so good that it didn't shift or shimmer as you moved your eyes, I think it would vanish after a couple of minutes. Only to reappear in inverse colours the moment you look away from the screen.
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May I just comment on the fact that the hardware specs and device interface specs are just available on the site? Why bother with: "This will be only Windows software for now", when it's quite easy to write a driver for this stuff?
Admitted, I've not written a driver before for Linux or BSD yet, but I assume it shouldn't be too hard if the specs are public available.
At least this makes it quite a lot easier than to write a driver for nvidea chipsets.
This is a replacement signature.
So people can look forward to suffering permenant brain damage instead of carpal tunnel syndrome as they flail their heads around trying to move a pointer on the screen?
here is a MCSE demonstrating the new windos XP "Head Up" interface.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
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of course, how the hell would you click and drag? or highlight something with your eyes closed?
While it has been a boon to those with disabiliies, a gadget like this for the rest of us would probably reduce RSI quite a bit. As much as people complain about keyboards, unergonomic mouse techniques are probably responsible for at least as many injuries.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I can move pikachu with my mind!
The real problem with eye-movement-based systems is that, when you're looking at something, your eye is often focused on a point near the object, and not the object itself.
That's why this technology is currently only being used by people with disabilities, and the "buttons" are huge.
I once saw an interview with somebody using one - they found it easier than a normal mouse for average (business) work, and alright for games like StarCraft. Clicking was done with your foot (too bad it wasn't by tilting your head forward into a blunt object). The only real complaint he had was when playing Quake: he couldn't look around 'cause then he couldn't aim - so he got fragged. And he couldn't aim because he had to look around to see if people were coming from other directions - he got fragged again!
I can't be karma whoring - I've already hit 50!
SIG: HUP
What happens when you turn your head 90 degrees so you can look next to yourself in a game. Sounds pretty limiting for gaming, unless you have a nice 4 monitor setup.
The alignment process can't be too comfortable if you have something attached to your head. You can't move around in your chair.
I'd much rather have something that can watch my eyeballs, but then again, while I'm reading a webpage, my mouse would continually be hovering over the text I'm reading.
I don't think that this would be very useful. The head/neck wasn't designed for many, rapid, precise movements all day long (say, at work). The hand/wrist/arm was. Besides, I'd much rather have repetitive stress in my write than in my neck.
Doesn't this take us back to the 0-click shopping patent?
Goodbye Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, welcome neck injuries, back injuries, headaches.
anonyminity
360 degrees of Karma
Check out Headmaster Plus. I work in adaptive technology and this kind of stuff has been going on for a few years now.
Just bang your head on the desk twice in rapid succession. Most computer users do this a few times a day anyway.
ahoy, just wanted to point out that the software has an option called "key activated clicking," so that the cursor doesn't move unless you hold down a key. lots of other hot keys too. and the ability to add customized hotkeys... (ECT employee)