Engineering News

I can see this a little bit but I don't think the mouse will disappear quite that quickly.
It is much more accurate than touchscreens, clickwheels, trackballs or sliderules!

Yup, the mouse will die off....then we can use Wiimotes!!

Touchscreen...what a great idea.

I practically punch my fist through the monitor now when Microsoft Word causes me problems.

And that's without any need to touch the screen at all.

I've wondered why we can use smart gloves instead of keyboards. What I mean is why can't we use gloves that detect the motion of our fingers. We could type like we nomally do, except instead of on a keyboard we could do it on any surface. Sort of like how a Wii controller works. The gloves are probably a bit cumbersome, we could probably use some other method. It just seems like in this day and age we should be able to work around keyboards for products like a blackberry or iphone.

In reply to this, aJapanese man had re-invented the computer keyboard. This new keyboard is a projector to display a picture of a keyboard on any surface for you to type on. The keyboard senses you moving your fingers over the keys and accepts that as typing. I have not tried the keyboard myself but am told that it works well.

That would be cool, but why do we even need the projection? By now when I type I never even look at the keyword. Why couldn't the letter I want to type be determined by the motion of my fingers?

Well there may be a problem. One, we need to know where to begin with our fingers for the typing in the first place, hence the projection. Two, most people that I know type by feel. They know that they missed a letter when they feel a button not going down or something similar. Whether there is a projection or not, there will still be some 'getting used to it'.

Yes, that's why your current keyboard has a significant movement of each key, and even may make a clicking sound when struck properly - it emulates the typewriter keyboards which people were so intimately familiar with. They get further from that over the years; newer keyboards aren't like old-style ones, but they still have some of those features.

Two I agree would take time to get used to. As for point number one, think of it this way. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that you're near a keyboard. To type my left 4 fingers are on ASDF and my right 4 fingers are on JKL;. If I want to type the letter Q, I move my pinky upward and to the left about a 1/3 of an inch and press down. If I want to type the letter V I move my left pointer finger down and slightly right and press down. If I close my eyes I can type. Also, if I close my eyes and put my hands on my desk, I can fake type using hand motions that have become second nature. I agree that it would take some getting used to, but think of the convenience. All you'd need is a screen.

Computer... Hello computer...

"Just use the keyboard"

Oh, how quaint!

The mouse is AN answer to a graphical input device. Stylus is another. Do you remember the 'light pen' input on CGA displays? It was there as part of the 'standard'.

For servers, non-gui interfaces seem to be best. For user workstations, whether desktop, laptop, 'phone top', things will change.

As far as the mouse, it will be around for a while. Having me 'touch my screen' until there is something there to touch that makes sense to me, probably won't happen in a big way. Then only 'touch surface' I use regularly is the mouse replacement on a laptop. Oh yes, when I have to do much, I do have a mouse to plug into it!

Folks have offered the 'paperless society', now a 'mouseless one'. Sofar, we are still killing trees at a pretty good rate, so I assume we will still have desktop rodents for a while.

we will not be rid of mice, just an evolution of the pre-existing mouse, like previously mentioned, the wii concept... infrared. touch screen would get messy, all the oil on ones fingers.

Welcome aboard! I concur - I hate fingerprints on my screen. They distort the image and collect dust (as if static charge didn't do a good enough job of that). Former Iowegian here...