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.)

Comments

mmmmmmmmm...one more protocol!

[cdlu]

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.

We Sort of Have This Already

[ReadParse]

I'm not sure how new and exciting this is. Thinking of a screensaver, I think this is very similar to what we already have.

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

Touch sensors

[Bruce Perens]

Touch sensors are old tech. It has a high-frequency oscillator connected to the conductive case, and when someone touches the case, their body capacitance changes the frequency of the oscillator. Or you can do it with infra-red. Easy to build. You can even detect when someone's hand is close, not touching. Remember the Therimin? Poor Dr. Therimin got his life ruined by the Soviets, he wanted to make it a respectible musical instrument and they wanted him to work on military technology and essentially kept him under house arrest for decades.

Bruce

this is a solution to a problem microsoft created.

[thal]

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.

What is it good for?

[Spire]

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.

Re:this is a solution to a problem microsoft creat

[normiep]

the ironic part of this device, and the test page for it, is the total and absolute useless clutter they showin the toolbar of MS WORD. how many functions does a damned word processor need

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.