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Free Software Helps Disabled Use Mouse
An anonymous reader writes "A University of Washington team has developed a piece of free software to help those with motor control problems do what most of us take for granted every day: use a computer mouse to get stuff done. The Pointing Magnifier combines an area cursor with visual and motor magnification, reducing need for fine, precise pointing. The UW team is actively seeking user feedback."
I would have responded more quickly... but it took me about 3 minutes to track down the words I could copy and paste to form this.
If you lost both mouse and keyboard for 48 hours, I bet you'd beg to be given your mouse back. (even if you couldn't have your keyboard)
Give them a break. It's a start.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
CLIs are better than GUIs, I heard it on Slashdot. Apparently you don't even need a mouse to get work done.
This work is funded by Microsoft Research, Intel Research, and the National Science Foundation. If it leads to breakthroughs that are available to all individuals, no matter what computing platform they choose - great! But I've seen other public+private funded research end up owned and locked up by start-ups driven by the faculty doing the research. These end up benefiting the faculty member financially, they benefit the private companies who've invested, and they can be a windfall for the university - but the general public gets no benefit unless they buy into the commercial product. This bothers me, given that a good chunk of the work was done on the public dime (or, more accurately, on the public hundreds of thousands of dollars).
Research at publicly funded universities should be at least partially owned by the tax-paying public. It's not like these researchers are starving - full professors in engineering are making on the order of 20K a month, whether they're bringing in grants or not.
#DeleteChrome
And here I was, thinking that Free software helps a disabled mouse that was used as a test animal.
-- Cheers!
There's already the Zoom plugin. I would imagine that someone should be able to modify it to perform a similar operation.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Here is the project page.
And for those who don't want to do the digging to actually find out what the heck this thing does:
It implements a two-stage clicking process. Click once, a little "zoom bubble" pops up around the cursor, with a magnified version of what's underneath. Then, you make corrections to the pointer position (if necessary) and click again.
It's interesting, to be sure, but I wonder if a continuous-zoom mode is feasible.
Right tool, right job, etc.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Calm down. There is no chance that this will be locked away. If you look at the project pages linked in the article, you can see that they have both been released under the New BSD licence. And at the bottom of the Angle Mouse project page, it states:
This work was supported in part by Microsoft Research, Intel Labs, and the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-0811063 and IIS-0812590. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of any supporter.
So there you go, the project is still owned by the authors and not the companies that provided support.
But wouldn't the easier thing to use be something more along the lines of a pad? those genius pads are dirt cheap, variable sensitivity, and with software calibration should be easier to control I'd think than trying to wield a mouse if you have trouble with fine motor movements.
I know it wasn't originally designed for it, but then neither is a mouse, hence the software. but it just seems to me a pad would be easier all around to tweak especially considering that even the cheapo pad has custom control buttons running down both sides.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The subject isn't very clear, but.. well, my point is that why are these things always presented in a manner that it is somehow the software being open-source which enables stuff like this? After all, there's lots of closed-source development going in the medical area too and they've just as well helped hundreds if not thousands of people. Basically, what does the license have to do with the fact that it enabled a disabled person to do something? To me it just sounds like trying to spin this as somehow a superior achievement from open-source, not accomplishable with closed-source, while diminishing the real point in all this: the disabled person.
there may be something that I missed about this one, but I'm sure that I have seen the same or similar years ago. Might be already patented, time will tell.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
There seems to have been a lot of UW and MSR collaboration in research lately. I remember reading earlier about their information retrieval lab collaborating with MSR, and their AI lab working with MSR. Now this seems like an HCI lab working with MSR. I guess this shows it definitely helps to build your computer science department close to a big software company.
its what http://pvoice.org/ does
Lack of fine motor control isn't totally limited to the elderly and the disabled. As a healthy thirty year old, I had issues using a mouse with my wrist splint on last month. Something like this would have probably been perfect.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
This will be handy when tweaking images at the pixel level or navigating a huge document that's been zoomed out to 25%.
It's an interesting concept and more interface options for people with disabilities is always a good thing. I'll probably stick with my head-controlled mouse and piezoelectric switch until I get that chip implanted to control my computer with my brain. And then I'll pwn all your sorry asses in Crysis 11.