New Joystick Style Ergo Mouse

Mr_Perl writes "For those of us who love to use a mouse to play games, except for the wrist pain after too much of it, 3M has come up with a joystick-mouse type thing that is in my opinion very comfortable to use." I'd love to try one of these out. Not available yet tho. update my bad, it is out. Now I gotta find one.

Comments

Response time?

[Lizard_King]

Using a mouse has several distinct advantages in gaming. One of which is a nasty little response time that can be accomplished by simply "flicking" your wrist. This becomes an invaluable skill in fast-paced, high action games (Q3). With the Renaissance Mouse, your wrist becomes immobile so the mouse movement will be dictated by moving your arm.

I understand that immobilization the wrist will combat wrist pain, but there will be significant gaming trade-offs... Most hard core gamers I know would rather deal with wrist pain than become considerably slower at their favorite games.

Bah

[JediTrainer]

Why buy this when there's a hacking solution to the problem? I thought of this years ago.

Case in point: I was suffering from a case of RSI some years ago (before I figured out how the height of my chair and mousepad affected my wrists). My wrists were killing me every time I reached for the mouse.

The solution? A 50-line program written in C that (in Windows, sorry - my OS of choice at the time) polled my joystick, and translated its commands to the mouse pointer. Button 1 became 'click'. Button 2 became the left mouse button, and I linked Button 3 to 'double click'. Took me about an hour to whip up the program, and then I used it for about a month before my injury subsided and I was able to buy a better chair and adjust my desk height properly. It worked well, and it didn't cost me anything other than a smidge of time.

It made everything feel like a video game, though, so that was a bit weird. I've probably still got the program in my archives, but I'm at work and the file's at home somewhere.