Almost with each passing week another innovative way of interacting with your computer is announced. Now you can gesture at your computer, move your computer, and even think at your computer to make it do your will.
The death of the mouse is though largely exaggerated. The largest inhibitor to technical change is not the technology itself but the people using it. It’s not an accident that the main products for interacting with your computer by thought are aimed at gamers rather than business users.
The Wii is great fun, but it’s just that; fun. Would you be laughing if you had to gesture that image into place in your PowerPoint slide and you kept pushing it that little too far and in the end had to ask your 8 year old daughter to do it for you?
The mouse will not live forever, at some point the business world will embrace another form of interaction, but for the time being we can still amuse ourselves with the emerging forms of innovative input, here are a few;