3DConnexion has released a new version of its SpaceNavigator peripheral, which is a 6-DOF 3D navigation device that lets you control panning, rotation, tilting, and zoom with one hand, great for applications like CAD or Google Earth. The new model is designed for notebook use, and is smaller and lighter than the original without sacrificing any functionality. The thing is, though, that the SpaceNavigator depends to some extent on a heavy base to function properly. If the base is too light, it won’t keep steady when you’re yanking the thing around. The notebook version is only about half the weight of the full size version, which means you might have to be a little bit more gentle with it.
Somewhat paradoxically, the SpaceNavigator for notebooks costs $129, whereas the larger and heavier less portable but equally functional (and prettier) original SpaceNavigator only costs $59. I guess that’s because the notebook version includes a “travel case for effortless transport.” I love these things, but unless you’re carrying it everywhere, I’d save yourself some money and get the slightly bigger one.
You might remember that I wrote about Logitech’s MX Air last July, under the headline “Logitech’s MX Air Mouse Is Real, Spectacular.” I think spectacular might be an understatement now that I was finally able to wrangle myself a review unit to try out for a little while. The idea behind the MX Air is that you can use it as a normal wireless laser mouse, or you can pick it up and a gyroscopic sensor will kick in, letting you use it just as effectively in mid air. It’s hands down one of the sexiest peripherals I’ve ever had the pleasure of fondling, and unlike a lot of things that look this good, it’s intelligent and functional. But is it worth the $150 asking price? I think I can probably convince you… Read my full review, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Reading is such hard work without the internet at your disposal to cross reference anything that you don’t immediately understand. Until now, people had to read books while at the computer if they wanted to look stuff up, manually typing it in to Wikipedia or Google. It’s horrible, I know. The Dixau text scanner from Korean company Unichal makes is so that you only have to be next to the computer. It contains a little camera that is able to take pictures of text, recognize the characters, and then provide on-screen explanations via search engines.
The Dixau may seem totally superfluous (especially for $90), but what I think it’s designed for are Korean students who want to be able to translate words from English scientific texts on the fly. And with that in mind, it really could be useful even for native English speakers trying to decipher English scientific texts. I mean, I majored in geology, which is perhaps not the most technical of disciplines, and I still swear that half of those words were made up just to confuse people.
Although you can hold the Swiftpoint Slider like a pen, it’s primarily designed to work like a normal mouse, except on top of your keyboard: you put your thumb in the groove on the mouse, and you can mouse around without needing an additional surface for a mousepad, or having to deal with the limited area of a touchpad. Pinching the mouse with your finger allows access to the click buttons. If that doesn’t make sense, I completely understand, and there’s a video of how it works after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
As cool as the Optimus keyboard is, it’s still just a keyboard, with fixed keys that sit there, looking pretty and waiting to be pressed. The Siftables prototype (not concept, prototype) takes all the best parts of the Optimus keyboard (namely, the programmable OLED keys) and frees them into their own individual units. Each Siftable unit also contains short range infrared communicators, a 3-axis accelerometer, Bluetooth radio, flash memory, an integrated processor, a lithium polymer battery, some haptic hardware, and what look to be USB expansion ports. All that stuff in each Siftable. As you can see from the video, such complexity (especially when it comes to motion sensing and proximity communication) enables all sorts of interactive options. The sky is pretty much the limit with these things, and designers David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi already have “a number of collaborations in progress with researchers in academia and industry.”
If you can’t afford the Optimus Keyboard (and seriously, who can), you are currently able to sate your lust for programmable OLEDs with the Optimus Mini Three, which is a three buttoned/screened version costing a mere $150. According to the Art Lebedev blog, there is an Optimus Mini Three, version… Three… In the works. They say it’ll be “a completely new design,” called the “mini Tactus,” which will incorporate “one small sensor display divided into three (maybe more) zones.” Something with a touchscreen, maybe, if I know my Latin roots. It will also feature Bluetooth connectivity to get screen information from your computer, and will be “AC-powered.” So, um, it won’t be wireless at all? Maybe we’ll get some more updates, and some design tweaks, in the near future.
I was very impressed by Novint’s haptic controller when I tried it out last month. I seriously think haptics (force feedback) is one of the next big things when it comes to input devices. One of the other next big things is going to be more degrees of freedom, i.e. being able to do more than just mouse around in the x - y plane. This maglev joystick, from Butterfly Haptics, combines these two big things into an even bigger thing, since the joystick floats in midair through carefully controlled magnetic fields. The user grips a “flotor” that hovers in an electromagnetic bowl. Optical sensors track the position of the flotor as you move it through six degrees of freedom, including up/down, left/right, forward/backward, and pitch, yaw, and roll. The system can track 2 micron movements (that’s 1/5 of the diameter of a hair) and dish out up 40 newtons (something like 4 pounds) of resistance, which is easily enough to simulate the feel of a solid virtual surface. It’s also able to emulate extremely fine textures and friction coefficients.
I don’t know about your laptop, but the heat mine gives off could power a small industrial nation. Okay, maybe not, but it does a damn good job of toasting my pop tarts and rendering me sterile. The DORmino mouse takes all of that wasted heat and uses it to power a wireless mouse, utilizing silicon nanowires embedded in a pad that sits underneath your laptop, a thermoelectric converter, and an induction coil inside the mouse to transfer power up from the pad. The mouse itself has a touchscreen scroller and a bluetooth interface, and the pad rolls up for easy portability. The design has been entered in the 2008 Greener Gadgets Design Competition, and if it wins, it looks complicated enough that it still probably won’t be produced, unfortunately.
The Novint Falcon haptic controller has been out for a little while now, and from what I’ve seen, many people have a difficult time telling what it is at all, much less how it works or why on earth you’d want one. I may, in fact, have been one of those people. But slap a pistol grip on the thing and wire it up to a quality first-person shooter, and suddenly it all becomes clear. A haptic controller is a controller that provides some form of force feedback to the user: things like the PlayStation DualShock controllers qualify as haptic… drive over something bumpy, for example, and the controller shakes. It’s neat, but it’s one dimensional, in that all you get is different intensities of the same kind of shaking motion. The Falcon takes that concept and makes it three dimensional, allowing feedback to push or pull the controller in any direction. What does that mean? Recoil, baby. Once you’ve tried the Falcon, pretty much any other FPS controller seems tame by comparison. Hands-on impressions, pics, and a vid, all after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Anything squishy gets major points with me. Especially if it’s useful at the same time. The Lite-On Moldable Mouse has guts made out of soft modeling clay encased in a nylon polyurethane fabric cover. With a little bit of effort, you can rework the mouse into whatever shape feels most comfortable. Although the optical sensor is static in the bottom (along with the batteries), the click buttons and touch sensitive scroll well are stuck onto the cover and communicate with the rest of the mouse via RFID, so you can un-stick them and get creative. It’s a concept, but how hard could it possibly be to stuff a mouse with clay? Probably harder than it seems like it should be.
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