Five mice with exceptional vision... No. Wait. That's not how the song goes...

Honestly, I've felt like my past few blog posts have been cop-outs. Thankfully I found this interesting little video from Microsoft Research.

Mouse 2.0

Basically what we see here is surface technology built into a mouse for at least two designs, a design with electrodes that imitate surface technology, and a SideSight based mouse (which gives a raw input fairly reminiscent to that of the Surface anyway). So there you have it. The basic tech that costs $13000 now also can already be crammed into a tiny mouse and enjoyed for much less. Potentially.

My skepticism of the pricing aspect aside, there are some major cool points to these designs. In many cases, the touch based input can allow for very accurate manipulation of onscreen objects. This is obvious in terms of any image editing program. Unfortunately, in every case actually holding the mouse while making gestures seemed awkward. The best interface was probably the SideSight mouse, as the surface you were touching was not physically a part of the mouse.

-Tom