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Gyroscopic Mouse
Aron Schatz writes "You've heard of wireless mice, but how about deskless ones? This baby doesn't need a suface of any kind to be used. This one comes direct from Gyration."
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Didn't logitech make something similar to this with a track ball on it? I think it was called the "surfman" or something like that - really cool... had like a 20' range from the reciever box.
I have a GyroPoint Pro sitting right here. It's a wireless as well as deskless mouse. Also it's from the same company, Gyration. Only thing that makes this one differ is when I searched for the date... 1995.
I don't know about this. I can see my arm getting pretty tired after a while (LOTS of hours) of swinging and pointing with the mouse.
:p
That's the advantage of a desk mouse, you can rest your arm.
Then again, lots of geeks wouldn't find this a problem due to the extensive use of their right arm, what's a little more going to do?
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The OPTICAL version is new... I have one of these with a mouseball.
Silly man, those where "pucks". Entirely different. See, these are MICE.
Differences include what order they occur in alphabetically and number of letters.
Never confuse volume with power.
Wonder what kind of sites his bedtime surfing frequents?
Now once we get rid of the user too, we'll have the ultimate computer.
These have been around for a while--I remember using a gyroscopic mouse in a training room once back in late 1999/early 2000. It was nifty, but there were some issues with drift and sensitivity of the gyros. Trying to point with it was like trying to eat with a chopstick in each hand--clunky, awkward, and while you got the sense that enough practice would make you reasonably good at using it, it really wasn't worth the effort. In all, a cute little gadget, but of pretty limited use (not much beyond PowerPointing...)
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we've had one of these at work for 2 years now, they've been out longer than that.
slashdot should be ashamed of their blatent front page ads. was it really worth it taco?!
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Combine this with the one-handed keyboard and a pocket-sized computer, and you can look like a complete moron walking down the street!
I set one of these up at an international conference for Deere & Company back in late '99. It was really handy for the presenters, since they could use the mouse pointer to highlight parts of their powerpoint slides and wander all around the stage while doing so. Almost all the presenters got the hang of it immediately, and even those who didn't just used it as a remote "clicker" for advancing the frames. As far as I'm concerned, though, it would pretty much suck for desktop use.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Good thing it works without a surface. At that price, I couldn't afford a desk to set it on.
Surprised that the reviewer did not test this with a game or two. It could make for some interesting new games/gameplay, but would suck to have to quit gaming to recharge your mouse during a marathon gaming session.
I know that there have been previous versions of handheld wireless mice, but they lagged bad, this sounds like it would be better.
I love my Dyna-Flex PowerlBall Gyro gadget.
I wouldn't wonder if in a few years you'll see gyro engines popping out on the market. It's a very cool technology.
It's hard for me to say without having it my hand, but I gather this can be used like a desktop mouse as well as just in your hand.
Unfortunately, it looks very much like a desktop mouse, and I'm not entirely sure how it should be held if you're not using it on a surface. It looks like it's meant to be held with the fingers underneath and the thumb over the buttons, but this seems a bit cumbersome to me.
Ideally, you would still want to click with the same fingers as a desktop mouse, but it seems to me that doing this comfortably with a handheld device requires a completely different form. I think it would make sense to have some kind of add-on that changes the shape of the mouse depending on whether it's in the air or on a surface.
But again, I don't have the thing in my hands. I rather wish I did. :-)
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These have been around for awhile. We have them in some of our conference rooms, and we got them over 2 years ago. They're pretty cool for playing Q3 on the 12 foot screen. :) It's very easy to aim with it as you just hold down the trigger and point it at what you want to shoot, much easier than moving a regular mouse to aim.
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If you add another gyroscope (perpendicular to the first one) you have a three dimensional mouse.
Now, the big advantage of a three dimensional mouse doesn't come into play with present technology; the big trick with three dimensional mice would come up if you could map O directly onto the spatial centers of the subject's.... er, user's, brain. This is not as hard as you might hope... er, think. However, experiments with monkey's controlling a pixel notwithstanding, reading someone's nervous system to get I is gonna be pretty quirky and unreliable. Therefore, you want a three dimensional mouse.
Oh, and, also:
You won't notice any problems unless your on the computer straight for 8 hours a day.
Who the hell does he think buys gyroscopic mice?!?!?! Okay, some of the same yuppies who buy Parka's good to -40* Centigrade and never Manhattan. They buy them. Mostly, however, it's people who use their computers all the time! Using your computer for eight hours at a stretch isn't good for you (and ever single person on slashdot should stop doing it!) but I need it as an option, and I don't need to have to replace my mouse at 3 AM in order to keep working.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I had the finger model, but every time I flipped off my cubicle-mate, it rebooted the system or deleted an important document.
Can't scratch your butt either unless you remember to turn it off first.
Table-ized A.I.
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In the early 80's there was a company that made a joystick which had no base and used mercury switches to detect tilt. You just held it in the air and moved it around, much like this gyro-mouse. It wasn't cordless but damn did I want one! Anyone here actually get to use one of those things?
LEXX
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Crap, how can I click for the next picture when the mouse pointer keeps moving from the top of my screen to the bottom.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
1. I thought gyroscopes had to have some mass in relation the forces applied to them in order to stay oriented. It seems like a light 'scope could easily be knocked out of whack easily in a handheld device.
2. These 'scopes would require lots of power to keep spinning. My cordless optical uses two AA batteries a month.
3. How do you orient this thing to begin with?
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it worked well -- it was nice being able to let my arms rest naturally, and i found it easy to do precise mousing with it
the reason i stopped using it was that all of the computing i do involves frequent switching back and forth from mouse to keyboard. (& my keyboard was on my desk). for that reason, it is just easier to have the mouse next to the keyboard and not have to keep picking it up and putting it down.
ymmv, though. i'd like to try it again in combination with a keyboard in an ergo-proper keyboard tray, just leaving it in my lap when i needed to type something
Actually, there's a track on/off button for precisely this reason, in midair use. Kind of nice for scrollbars sometimes, you can just put the cursor on the pagedown button and turn off tracking, then click down by pages with no worry about drifting off the widget.
It's a cool idea, but the mouse is extremely sensitive to small motions. Unless you have really good fine control of your hands, save your money.
I really hate that aspect of the home PC industry. The packaging on a product isn't required to be specific about what it means when it says it "requires" something. Sometimes that's a lie and it just means "we only give phone support under those circumstances", and other times it really means what it says.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I had one of those. It was just four Mercury Switches with a button on the top of the handle.
Why choose white shoes?
I know a guy that just used an orange stick to model 3d with the help of a camera. The program ran on a Pentium level processor; the only thing that made it run a little slow was the camera, since he used a cheap one that could only record at 320x240 and 15fps.
I like that idea much better for playing 3d games. We don't use mice. We use SWORDS!
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Um.. no. NiCad's have a "memory effect" where they lose capacity if you charge them when they're not completely drained. NiMH's don't do this, it's one of their main benefits.
Plus, TONS of incorrect word usage, grammar and spelling errors, and awfully awkward phrasing. Enough to make our own beloved
And many, many, many more. (And it's a short article!) Either English isn't this guy's main language, or he's about 12.
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If they made a gyro mouse in the shape of a gun, they probably wouldn't be able to build them fast enough.
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From the article: I can think of nothing better than to lay in bed and browse the internet not even being near the computer.
Great! Can the mouse be used from another room? That would be really handy, being able to surf the internet from the next room away from the computer. Heck, you can even bring this mouse into the bathroom and keep on surfing the web.
Does anyone else think this might be at least a little annoying? I mean, it would slow me down a lot to have to assign one hand to using the mouse at all time. I often leave the mouse to type or enter strings of commands, and I wouldn't want to have a wireless mouse to use, especially if I can't even expect it to be on the desk. Keyboard shortcuts are great, but this wireless/deskless mouse seems like it would make it hard to use them.
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