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Review of Hands Free Mouse

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the look-ma-no-hands dept.

SLDave wrote in to plug his review of NaturalPoint's hands free mouse that covered by Slashdot some time ago. It seems to work as advertised, using a camera to track your head and replace your mouse, but with a lot of caveats. Definitely worth a look for us truly lazy folks.

6 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. Wouldn't it be better to track eye movement? by MikeOttawa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wouldn't it make more sense to track your eye movements, if I could *look* at the link on a page (lets say hold it in focus for one second) and follow the link life would be great. There is some technolgy that allows tracking of eye movement - I've seen it used to research how the human brain "reads" a page of text (by scanning all over it quickly).

    1. Re:Wouldn't it be better to track eye movement? by donutz · · Score: 1, Insightful

      But which eye? the left, the right, or both? What if you suffer from a lazy eye....if the hands-free mouse tracks the average focus point of both eyes...you'll have a hell of a time using it. Maybe it's a config setting to choose which eye to track.

  2. blind mice by rot26 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Without the ability to click handsfree, this thing is utterly worthless.

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    To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
  3. my head weighs 10 pounds, my hand: 2 pounds... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ...and this supposedly /saves/ work?

  4. Re:Uneven cursor speed at screen edges? by nsample · · Score: 3, Insightful
    A little lesson in geometry might answer your question...


    You're right about there being less motion in the head near the edges, however, less motion is required to describe the movements near the edge. A user's head tilting 45 degrees from orthogonal to the center of the screen describes a circle of radius 5", if her face is 5" from the screen. (Too close, I know, but just for sake of easy math.) Add another 45 degrees to that, and she's 90 degrees from the screen, defining an infinite plane, parallel to the plane of the monitor. Infinity is what we like to call "far," Russ.


    Now, those are just two points, but I think you can get it from there... very small changes at the edges translate into large motions over the plane (in this case, the monitor).


    This may mean that there's a potential problem with resolution at the edges, but not with motion or speed.

  5. Alot of great applications besides for lazy people by Mashiki · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If anyone here has worked in heavy manfg. or industry where you need to use a computer on the shop floor or at a workstation on a shop floor you'll know how quickly a mouse will die, I can see a thousand diffrent applications besides the use for "lazy people".

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