New Technologies Seek to Replace the 'Mouse'

The humble mouse's days may be limited - with many new technologies aiming to replace the household item found in countless homes and offices around the world.

|PIC1|Created back in the 1960s by Douglas Engelbart, it was Bill English who invented the ball mouse which became such a common sight. Today's mouse is likely to be optical, using a laser or LED to sense movement on a surface and do away with the moving parts which tended to get clogged up on the earlier devices.

However, as people look for new and more novel input devices, it may be that the mouse finds itself relegated to a relic of the computer past - with motion sensor devices and optical technology now beginning to gain the sophistication needed to become widely adopted.

Most prevalent in the news at the moment are the motion detector technologies, working in a number of ways; one of the most common is to use a camera that tracks movement - normally in conjunction with target spots on the gloves or body, but there are also sensors that can be worn that track actual movement as it occurs. Both methods can be programmed to read gestures so that, for instance, a movement of two hands apart could stretch an image or enlarge a window.

The upside of this technology is that it is inherently intuitive for people to use gestures to control things. We grow up with gestures and the familiarity of the techniques play a large part in the continued interest in this technology.

There are drawbacks, however, with large movements becoming very tiring.

If you continually have to make sweeping gestures with your hands, especially those that involve moving the whole arm, you may well find that you end up with muscle fatigue.

Although still some way off, experiments are ongoing with implanted chips or embedded cameras that allow an even simpler pointing method - using the mind rather than your hands to get the computer to do what you want simply by thinking it.

Indeed, Matthew Nagle - a quadriplegic - had a tiny chip embedded into his head by scientists at Brown University in the US which read electrical patterns that allowed him to move a cursor.


Laptops, tablets and touch screens

However, it is not just future technologies that is jeopardizing the mouse's continued success; with the number of laptops being sold, normally with their own non-mouse pointing systems, increasing at a huge rate.

Most laptops have the familiar motion pad to move the cursor around the screen, but other utilize a 'nub,' a small sensor that can be manipulated with a digit.

Of course, another increasingly popular control method is the touchscreen. With the likes of Apple introducing the iPhone, and several other mobile phone companies like Nokia, LG and Samsung going to touchscreen control methods and doing away with traditional control methods such as buttons.

|PIC2|The iPhone hit the headlines in a blaze of publicity as Apple supremo Steve Jobs revealed that gestures such as pinching and rubbing would be interpreted by the phone into commands.

The tablet computer is another touch screen entry method that is gaining quite a following. Although the explosion of tablets has yet to take place - the excitement at the mobile phone changes is likely to translate to bigger computers in increasing numbers.

Many laptops are now being built to also work as tablets - often replacing the mouse with a stylus that allows you to simple point to a part of the screen. Again, this can incorporate gestures that allow tasks to be performed with ease.

Touchscreen displays are getting cheaper and more common by the day - and although the human finger is sometimes a little oversized and clumsy for the tiny operations needed on a computer screen, the technology is evolving steadily.


Do not throw them away yet...

But the mouse is not ready to hang up its click wheel just yet. Sales of portable mice (or mouses - either is considered correct as a plural) are high for the simple reason that the mouse is a simple, effective and intuitive way to move a cursor round a screen.

The technology is cheap and widespread and, even with new technologies on the horizon, it would still be a while before we saw the end of it.