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Mouse Fun from Microsoft
James Cook writes "A mouse that can sense when your hand touches it was built a while ago by the boys at Microsoft Research. It enables nifty user interface tricks, like toolbar menus that fade away when you aren't touching the mouse. I want one, then I want Linux drivers for it." Forget who built it. This looks like something worth having (once enough Linux software supports it to make it worthwhile.)
Just what we always needed. Next thing you know we will have a mouse that detects where you _want_ to go. And if you actually move the mouse in a direction other then this predicted direction, a paperclip will come up and inform you that the mouse has travelled in the wrong direction.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Tech Review did an article on Lord Bill's Boys-in-the-Back-Room back in January. (Same issue they covered linux.) (Alas, no link to the M$ article.)
Basically the article pointed out that The-Boys-From-Redmond are the only software house with a research arm (remember Xerox is fundamentally a hardware company.), M$ has beaucoup bucks, and a lot of big name people, but still has yet to create any sort of breakthrough. (compare to XeroxPARC that created the GUI in only a few years)
The article suggests that the reason is that M$ is too secure in its position, and thus won't take the risks needed to motivate an R&D lab. Also the lab is too product driven and thus doesn't have the freedom just to go off and play.
However, M$ Research has contributed to pretty much every recent major M$ product. Such contributions include data compression, and speech recognition. Oh yeah, you know that inference engine help uses in Office? M$ Research did that.
Quote For You!
M$ Research Director Dan Ling on where M$ needs to do more research (pg49):
"The amount of time and effort that goes into testing software and getting the bugs out is enormous. And yet there are still bugs, and people still complain and say nasty things. We're trying to think about breakthroughs that we can make to dramtically improve the quality of software."
(2 weeks later M$ "innovates" lint.)
I can't wait to 3D model with a force feedback mouse. Need to stretch that vertex ever so slightly? Just increase the tension and slowly push it in. It's like working with virtual clay. And talk about cool image maps, when feel a ripply water effect under your hand or maybe a rough stone gateway. Not to mention the possible application for the visually impared, feeling the pointer drop into the the scroll bar around a window. You can have your touchy mouse, I want a feely one. P.S. I know somewhere in Palo-Alto California there is a company making this, I just wish I remebered whom. Read that article years ago.
In the old days of barbarism, the people fought with hatchets. Civilized men buried the hatchet, and now fight with g
When most people touch the mouse, they can't help but move it. What's keeping the applications of today from having toolbars fade away after an input timeout and come back as soon as the mouse is moved slightly (in most cases, that would be when it's touched).
Is it a cool invention? Sure, it's great to make devices more responsive to natural human movements, but I don't see this as revolutionary... moreover, I stuggle to think of even one piece of real functionality that this mouse would enable, that cannot be done today.
But maybe that's just me...
RP
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
the ironic part of this device, and the test page for it, is the total and absolute useless clutter they show in the toolbar of MS WORD. how many functions does a damned word processor need and how many of them can readily recognized by a 8x8 pixel icon?! i don't understand 1/5 of the icons i see when i use MS WORD. this is the reason we have pull down menus. they're a good thing. you don't need some $200 mouse to simulate the same thing.
The "killer app" described on the Touch Mouse Web page is the ability to "simplify & reduce screen clutter". This is accomplished by removing mouse-oriented UI elements, such as toolbars, whenever the user isn't touching the mouse. Well and good -- except for two things:
1. Almost the same thing is easily accomplished with a non-Touch-Mouse by simply monitoring the time since the last mouse movement. If the user hasn't moved the mouse in, say, five seconds, remove the "extraneous" toolbars. As soon as the user moves the mouse again, fade the toolbars back in. I believe that this is sufficiently similar to the behavior of the Touch Mouse to render the Touch Mouse not really worth the trouble (at least for this purpose).
2. The toolbars aren't necessarily extraneous at all. Many toolbar buttons provide useful visual feedback. For example, in Microsoft Word, one can easily tell whether the current insertion point is in "bold" mode by glancing at the "B" button on the style toolbar, and checking if it's depressed or not.
Comclusion: The Touch Mouse, as presented on the Microsoft Web page, is an interesting idea, but not exactly compelling at this stage.
begin 644
Maybe MS Should go into making hardware instead of software (I am a fan of their mice/keyboard), but something tells me MicroHard(R) probably won't go over well with the stockholders. On second thought, maybe it will... (that ain't stock they're holding!)
On a more serious note, I like the work that Microsoft research labs do. I saw an interesting article in a magazine a few months back, comparing Linus Torvalds and the GNOME team to Bill Gates and Microsoft Research labs (does anyone know the magazine or article, and if its available online?)
Microsoft Research to me is what PARC was in the 70's... they're heavily into UI research, namely natural-language UI research, because it's inevitable that voice controlled computers need to grasp natural languages. Personally, I'm a big fan of the consistency of Microsoft's UI's as compared to the forest of X toolkits (it doesn't compare to NeXTstep or MacOS or Be), personally they should drop the OS thing and go into UI and applications management (IMHO). Oh well, enough pipe dreaming.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
Microsoft has hired a lot of top people for their Research arm, and they do a lot of cool stuff, but I've yet to hear of anything they are doing making it into a product. There is a story that some research from Microsoft, about 15 years ago, led to a genetic algorithm that found a more efficient way to convert a string of digits to a binary representation, but I can't recall the details. I think Microsoft Research does what they do as a marketing activity, to prove that Microsoft can do "pure" research just like other highly capitalized high-tech businesses.
Microsoft Product divisions are all too busy renaming their distributed object technology, again, to actually integrate any real innovations.
Oh come on, they showed a lot of the buttons at once just to demonstrate their new little toy. Obviously very few people would actually need that many functions, however its nice to have the option to put whatever you want on that toolbar. The last time I checked you could customize the bar to contain as much or as little as you want.
And yes, it is useful to have a word processor that can do a lot of functions. Maybe you don't have a use for that many, but I'm sure there are are other people out there who do.
and how many of them can readily recognized by a 8x8 pixel icon?! i don't understand 1/5 of the icons i see wAhen i use MS WORD. this is the reason we have pull down menus. they're a good thing. you don't need
Its all a matter of how frequently you are using certain tools. Maybe there are people who can and do use all of those little icons. Again, its nice to have the choice.
The point is that, I don't see how you can claim that microsoft created a problem by including all of these features. I mean you can turn them off if you want. Besides, every other piece of software from word perfect to netscape pretty much uses the same style of toolbar.
On the other hand, I do agree that this does seem a little pointless for what would probably be a 200 dollar piece of equipment. Plus I have my own gripes about the usefulness of the example they showed... but those were covered in another post, so never mind with them now.
-- Point? None! Cob.
Microsoft has a distinction called being a "Microsoft Research Fellow" (meant to be a title of distinction - not just joe bloe shmoe). I've attended a couple of lectures by Microsoft Research Fellows in the past and have been amazed at their knowledge - these people are not faking their intelligence.
What I want to know is, if Microsoft has all of these researchers that innovate so well, why can't they get the infrastructure in their own company to funnel this research directly into products? There is no point in letting this research go to waste, which is what I truly believe happens. Or another possibility would be to open up this research - allow other, non-Microsoft intellectuals comment on their research. Yes, this would mean releasing ideas Microsoft could capitalize on in the future, but they don't seem to be doing it anyway, so why not benefit everyone?
- Shaheen
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Yes and no.
:(
Optical mice have been out for a *long* time. I used one on a Mac Plus years ago, I have a Mouse Systems Optical mouse on my PC now, that I've had for over a year.
The Microsoft one, although optical, works on a different principle to most optical mice, and because of that, it can be called "new".
A conventional optical mouse has a pair of light emiting diodes of different colours, which point at a special mouse pad which has a pattern on it.
In the early days it was a crosshatch pattern where the horizontal and vertical lines were different colours, so one diode picked up the vertical movement, and the other the horizontal. The lines were quite large and obvious, and the resolution wasnt that high.
Later ones like my Mouse systems one have a grid of tiny silver dots on a dark grey background, and the pad is aluminium. The problem with that is that although its very accurate, you really have to look after the pad. Drop it, bend it, scratch it, and you're in trouble.
As well as that, the mouse has felt pads for feet, not the conentional teflon feet (which would scratch the surface) so what tends to happen is sweat builds up on the pad, soaks into the feet and prevents the mouse from sliding smoothly
Needless to say the mouse wont work on anything but its proper pad.
The Microsoft one on the other hand essentially has a small CCD camera in the bottom, (and an led for illumination) which takes pictures of the surface 1500 times a second, and uses a DSP processor to correlate the pictures and determine direction and speed of movement.
Because of this it will work on nearly any surface, (excluding things like mirrors etc) because most surfaces are grainy when you look at them closely. For me it combines the best of both worlds - optical precision, but with the ability to use most types of mouse pads or surfaces..