New Gadgets and Gizmos

Silicon Valley scientist Doug Englebart created the mouse input device 40 years ago and it’s proved to have a lasting presence. But now, an analyst from Gartner has read the technology tea leaves and given the little gadget a death sentence — by 2013, the mouse will be dead.

According to him, the rise in popularity and quality of interactive UIs (like the Wiimote) and accurate motion detections (the iPhone’s Accelerometer) are pushing out the mouse by effectively acclimating the general public to new UIs.

The thinking goes that by the time every single PC monitor becomes touch-compatible, people will have lost their mouse preference and won’t seek it out. Clearly, this isn’t too much of a reach — most people have become acclimated to the touchpad in laptops and don’t use a mouse, even if that touchpad isn’t always as accurate. 

But we think this is a prophecy that is a bit too optimistic. Let’s take a quick look at the top technologies and ideas angling to take control from the mouse.

Touch screens: The accuracy of touch screens is improving but they’re not perfect yet. For example, the touch area distribution range is still better for a mouse — fat fingers on a mouse can operate a tiny cursor, while fat fingers on a touch screen might force you to select something unnecessary. This will be better in five years, but enough to kill the mouse? Maybe a more improved touchpad will do the trick.

Eye-tracking: A cursor controlled by eye movements might be the most
likely UI to succeed. Why? It involves less work than the others. Lazy
people don’t want to move around the office like a Minority Report-era
Tom Cruise on a Red Bull binge, flapping their arms out.  There is a
project that measures the length of time a person looks at an object onscreen, so that a cursor is activated to highlight said object (or
text) and a single keyboard touch of redefined right and left mouse
keys will perform the function.

Already, there are eye-tracking machines helping out in medical
surgeries, but porting that accuracy to people (through
pupil-center/corneal-reflection methods) and into the consumer market
will likely take longer than 5 years. Think ten or more.

Force-feedbacks: The two-way relationship between data on a monitor and
a person is an improvement over the mouse. If you ‘feel’ what you see
on the screen, it will be a dynamic experience and you’ll want to use
that over the inanimate mouse. Haptic technology is already used in
many gadgets.

But this is a Need vs. Want situation. Until an application forces us
to use haptics, the functions the mouse performs won’t need to be
replaced.

Accelerometer sensors: Tilting mechanisms are interesting, and the
dynamism is key here. But unless you’re playing a game in a 3D
environment where acceleration and gravity are important, it doesn’t
take the place of any of the basic functions of the mouse.

Voice Commands: Joined with artificial intelligence, voice-commands
might take out the mouse with easy management of several different
tasks at once. Speech recognition is already becoming a common
technology. But it’s not completely accurate yet (see the problems found in speech recognition programs for Windows Vista). This likely won’t be
ready in five years.

Gesture recognition: This seeks to create the same type of interactive
UIs as the touchscreens, but in the air. Here, speed and accuracy are
also a factor, and in order to work accurately, the specific movements
of each individual person will need to be calibrated. People are
already saying that the new motion-plus attachment for the Wii will be
harder to control precisely because it’s more accurate.

So maybe it’ll be harder to mouse to die by that date.

Photos: Jeff Kubina/Flickr (touchscreen), Jason Babcock (eye-tracking), nova031/Flickr (mouth)

Sources: BBC.co.uk, ubimon, PC Authority, Giz, webanalytics

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