Three students from MIT Media Lab have invented an invisible and very cheap computer mouse. Using a tracking camera and infrared beam, the mouseless system registers and interprets a human hand’s movement and translates it into onscreen actions such as cursor movement and button clicking.
With their Mouseless prototype, a user’s hand movements are tracked with a line-capped Infrared laser beam and an Infrared tracking camera. The beam’s plane is focused just above the surface of the user’s hand area and when the user cups the hand, as if holding a real mouse, this breaks the beam at the points where each finger touches the surface. The camera then registers and interprets the changing field shapes and translates them into movement or action, such as clicking and double-clicking.
The students are continuing to enhance the tracking and recognition algorithms to build up a library of commands, possibly leading to multi-touch gesturing in addition to simple click confirmation.
The prototype of mouseless system is said to have cost just US$20 to put together.
