A complete breakthrough in the computing world when a device has been invented which can interact with the computer in a 3Dimensional Virtual World. It is time to say Goodbye to the Computer Mouse.
It’s time to say goodbye to the ever so indispensable, the lifeline of our PCs, the Computer Mouse!
Yeah my gizmo friends! It has dawned on earth! It has come to rescue all of us form that tiny winy little crawling device we couldn’t do without! Aaaah the PCing experience will be so different now. So carefree! So magical!
Ok, let me just break the news to you!
Our very own alikes, the structured young brains, Anh Nguyen and Amy Banic from the University of Wyoming in the US have created an intelligent thimble that can sense its position accurately in three-dimensions and respond to a set of preprogrammed gestures that allow the user to interact with objects in a virtual three-dimensional world.
This thimble-like device that sits at the end of your finger, allows you to interact with the virtual world in three dimensions and it may render the indispensable computer mouse obsolete.
Haven’t we humans been haunted by this mousy piece ever since we started our actual communication with the computers since 1960s? And that too the interaction through this mouse is limited to two dimensions.
Now we have an ABSOLUTE BREAKTHROUGH!
According to MIT Technology Review, Nguyen and Banic aimed to create a cheap device that works as a universal input for more or less any computing device. They want to make it as small and unobtrusive as possible so that it can be easily transported. The 3DTouch sits on the end of a finger, equipped with a 3D accelerometer, a 3D magnetometer and 3D gyroscope. That allows the data from each sensor to be compared and combined to produce a far more precise estimate of orientation than a single measurement alone. The 3DTouch also has an optical flow sensor that measures the movement of the device against a two-dimensional surface, exactly like that inside an ordinary mouse. WHOA!! Magic and some more MAGIC!
For now, the device is hooked up by wire to an Arduino controller which combines the data from all the sensors. The fused data is then streamed to a conventional laptop.
“This wired connection later could be replaced by a wireless solution using a pair of XBee modules,” researchers said. Researchers have also built in a number of mouse-like gestures that allow a user to interact with 3-D objects, by selecting and dragging them.
And guess what? They have tested their new device to measure its pointing accuracy and say that it is reasonably good. Voila! Isn’t it a GOOD NEWS!
Well I can’t wait for the time when my fingers can actually create the magic with this thimble! Can you?
