Tag: Optical

For over 20 years, gamers have been using a mouse to control their video games. Over the last couple of years, motion controls such as the Kinect, Move and Wii-mote have become common on game console, and are starting to make their way to PC gaming and other computer uses as well.

Ring another death knell for the optical drive. While still popular, the optical drive’s days began to be numbered when netbooks came out. Apple is slowly but surely leaving them out of their new computers. Now an upcoming product aims to make them even more obsolete.

I’m always coming across all sorts of interesting inventions over on Kickstarter, and this one is definitely one of the more unusual ones I’ve seen lately. The TurboHarp ELX is what its inventor calls “the world’s first and only fully-electric harmonica.”

It’s common today for ultraportable notebooks and netbooks to come without an optical drive of any kind. The notebooks and desktops that do come with optical drives often lack the latest features like support for 3D Blu-ray.

Counterfeit products are a huge problem for manufacturers these days. There have been numerous attempts to reduce counterfeits by attaching small one or two color holograms to goods and credit cards, but they’ve been fairly easy for sophisticated copycats to clone.

I think that’s actually an understatement. The Rotobotmouse is one of the stranger computer mice that I’ve seen in my travels – and I’ve seen lots of mouses. Created by artist Aaron Ristau, the Rotobotmouse definitely has some steampunk underpinnings, but it’s really got a look that’s all its own.

The HypnosEye lets you project images from the screen of your iPhone, iPod Touch or other mobile device onto a screen. Nope, it doesn’t take the video signal and project it using a separate light source – it actually uses a special anti-glare mirror and lens to blow up the screen onto a projection surface.

Newly formed company Smartfish Technologies teamed up with the New York-based Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) to come up with a wireless mouse designed to prevent and alleviate wrist strain. The result? A bobblehead mouse. Well, not exactly but the TRU:MOTION mouse’s “thing” is that it pivots and conforms to the direction and angle of your hand’s movements, so that your wrist is never in a fixed position.

Feeling retro? If you’ve got a hankering to cram an old 3.5″ floppy disk into your computer, but it has no floppy drive, now you can live out your floppy fantasies by stuffing one into your almost as outdated CD-R drive.

Looking for a new way to unleash your creative freedom? Check out this wacky camera which lets you combine multiple images onto a single frame of film. The Lomo Split-Cam uses special adjustable light blockers which let you prevent the top, bottom, left or right section of standard 35mm film from being exposed before advancing to the next frame.

The rubber ducky mouse is a mouse that has a little duck floating in some blue liquid at the bottom, to make your computing experience a tad more whimsical. Rubber duckies always, always, always make me think of Bert and Ernie.

Here’s one from the “why didn’t I think of that” file. The bright minds at computer accessory-maker Deluo have created a mouse that doubles as a GPS receiver for your portable computer. The Deluo MouseGPS embeds a GPS receiver inside of the shell of a USB optical scroll mouse.

Here’s a combo gadget that seems like a pretty good idea on paper, but I don’t know how practical it really is. This USB device from Lexibook mixes an optical mouse, a calculator and a numeric keypad in a single package.

This new fan attachment for the back of the Xbox 360 gives you much more than just supplemental cooling. It actually adds a variety of direct-access connectors to the back of the console, eliminating the need for special adapter cables.

Sony Japan recently released a new USB mouse with a unique twist. Simply pick up the mouse from your desktop, and it flips open to become a Skype telephone handset. The Sony VN-CX1A telephone mouse is a fully-functional optical mouse which works with all Windows PCs.