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A Pistol Mouse for Your Fragging Pleasure
ErgoSeating writes "In my search for an ergonomic mouse I stumbled upon something called the PistolMouse. This mouse is shaped like a pistol and uses a trigger as the left button but tracks with an optical sensor on the bottom, not the sight or barrel. In a twist of irony, the mouse is ergonomically shaped because the pistol grip alleviates stress on your carpal tunnel-ridden wrist. Its Linux compatible and looks like it could be just the thing to brighten up my desk. Here is a review of the item with some good pictures." Not sure how it's ironic -- the modern handgun reflects hundreds of years of user testing -- but it looks fun, and a hoot to travel with by air.
As a "fast twitch" player who's been playing first person shooters for longer than I care to admit, I highly doubt I would ever use this product. It forces you to use the much less precise muscles of the shoulder and upper arm as opposed to the muscles of the forearm. I'll take my carpal tunnel syndrome thank you.
Since (situational) irony is the opposite of what's expected, I would say that the submitter was probably correct in his or her use of "ironic." If I were to encounter something like this, I would immediately assume that it was a lame gimmick built to cheesily cash in on the novelty market, which would probably make me doubt the mouse's ergonomics.
It surprises me that light guns haven't been brought back due to the popularity of First Person Shooters. How difficult could it be to add motion sensors to one... so you could tilt the gun to strafe/move, rotate to turn and lift/drop for jump and crouch?
8==8 Bones 8==8
Back in the day (1983), I used a CAD system that had a light pen pointer and a true vector display. The CAD software drew the picture by plotting the electron beam on a circular CRT screen (i.e., it did not use a raster scan). The base of the desk-sized console had a massive rack of boards that converted the line list into vector scan deflections. The pen (you touched the pen directly to the screen) had a small hole and photodiode that monitored the timing of the trace to determine what you were pointing at.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It doesn't function like a gun, and it doesn't have to look like one, either. There are lots of other artefacts with a pistol grip that don't look like guns at all - from old 8mm film cameras to hairdriers.
Heck, there are even guns that don't look like guns.
Besides, the classical light pen/gun design relies on the scanning of the electron beam in the CRT display to detect where the thing is pointed, so it won't work with LCD displays. And bluetooth has too much latency for the type of sync required to detect the exact moment when the electron beam crosses the spot on the screen where the pen/gun is pointed - you'd neen some means of feeding the video sync pulses to the gun electronics in real time. Or, an alternative design based on a different principle, possibly with some gizmo installed at the edge of your monitor.
most/all MAME emulated games that support a light gun also support a mouse but not visa versa. So this means that games like Terminator 2 will work great.
It's a funny joke. Let me be a wet blanket.
Some pistols don't have an additional safety beyond those that are built-in. Some incorporate the safety into the trigger itself -- i.e., when you pull on the trigger you automatically deactivate the safety. Revolvers typically don't have an external safety button but are considered safe with the hammer down. If you are paranoid about accidental discharge, you would keep the hammer down over an empty cylinder -- 100% impossibility of firing without pulling the trigger. Newer revolvers usually use a bar between the firing pin and hammer. The bar rises during the trigger pull. In this way, the hammer can be down over a full cylinder and still be completely safe because the hammer physically can't contact the firing pin. Scroll down to page 11 for a nice mechanical diagram.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good