One button, two buttons, three buttons, ten million buttons. Beige, black, white, red with polka dots. Glow-in-the-dark, see through. Right-handed, left-handed, both. Vertical for RSI patients, trackballs for weirdoes like myself, Apple's puck mouse for sado-masochists. The ubiquitous mouse comes in all possible shapes, forms, sizes, and colours, but according to our friend The Analyst, the glorious age of the mouse is coming to and end. Do we believe The Analyst?
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Member since:2005-11-13
[q]Where the touchscreen still fails is desktop and gaming.
I'm not in a rush to be poking at my monitor suspended by arm over my desk.[/]
Yeah, me neither. But the facial recognition thing sounds kind of interesting, though not sure how that would work... just move my eyes where I want the pointer to go, but I have a stigmatism so the pointer would be jumping around the screen like a biznitch. Plus, I guess I'd have to pick my nose or something to click and drag 
Member since:2007-09-06
That's pretty much it from what I've read. The system tracks your eye movements and resonds accordingly. Think of a flightsim. You move the mouse right and left or whatever view control you have and the monitor simulates looking over the full range of view accordingly. Move the mouse a little left, monitor moves a lot left and I see my left wing. Look at the center of the screen and I get a forward view, look left and the monitor view pans left; there's my wing again.
It's a very interesting input aproach but it'll need to mature and be used where applicable after the romantic novelty period of everything trying to make use of it ends.
Member since:
2007-09-06
Having a touchscreen on the toughbook has truly spoiled me. I've lost count of how often I've poked someone's screen trying to hit [OK] after being on my own machine for more than fifteen minutes. Touchscreen PDA are a given these days too though the physical keyboard on sliders is an additional advantage.
Where the touchscreen still fails is desktop and gaming.
I'm not in a rush to be poking at my monitor suspended by arm over my desk. My workstation at the office has a tube monitor but set back from the desk edge so reaching for it constantly would suck too. A notebook, absolutely but on a desktop, the mouse still has a place.
For gaming, a touchscreen isn't going to cut it either with the current FPS offerings. A top down strategy it has more place but you'd want a big touchscreen table for that ideally. I've tried Quake on the N810; runs well, looks great, using touchscreen for aiming sucks.
Granted, games and UI interface in general will evolve to make use of the new input method more but I think there will still be a place where the mouse is a better input.