No More Mouse: MIT Invents Invisible Mouse!

We all knew that the day would come, the day when something would make the mouse obsolete. Many prominent tech company leaders have suggested that we will no longer be using a mouse in the future, and by the looks of it, it seems to be true. Even though the mouse is a great tool for navigating our computer’s user interface, it’s quite old fashioned and the source of many different muscle injuries around the world.

So what will we be using instead? Well, it’s not that much different really. However, it’s way more comfortable and will ultimately create a more relaxed and straight forward working posture. Pranav Mistry, Pattie Maes, and Liyan Chang, researchers from MIT’s Media Lab, have come up with the awesome technology of an invisible mouse.

By using an infrared laser and an infrared camera, the movement of the hand gestures are tracked and recorded then converted into the mouse’s movement on the screen. At first glance, the system looks slow and tedious, but this prototype is just the first step in developing a new way for us to navigate our computers. In the future, this technology could possibly enable hand gestures and user interface navigation on far smaller devices than our laptops and stationary computers.