Logitech Powerplay brings us a wireless charging wireless mouse

Earlier this month we saw a Corsair prototype that featured a wireless mouse whose mar served as a wireless charging station, but now Logitech steps forward and bring a similar product to market: the Powerplay and Lightspeed mouse.

Douglas Engelbart - the "Father" of Computer Mouses and ARPANET - passed away

People sit down at their desks and immediately put their hand over a mouse to interact with the computer screen in front of them; windows move around the screen, allowing you to do multiple things at the same time; you click on a hyperlink and immediately expect to see a page on your screen that is being served by a computer on the other side of the planet. We consider all this to be "common", and we might even be tempted to think that things are possible just because... it "happens".

But it isn't so. Things are possible because someone had the vision to turn them into reality. And all of the things I mentioned before are possible, in large part, thanks to Douglas Engelbart - a technology pioneer that brought us the graphical user interfaces, the computer mouse, and even the foundation of what  would grow to become the Internet.

Nothing better to remember him by watching the amazing "Mother of All Demos", that reminds us that everything we now take for granted... had to be invented first.

Mouse Without Borders from Microsoft

From Microsoft's garage (the equivalent to Google employee's pet projects and Labs) we can now get this interesting Mouse Without Border. A small program that allows us to share a single mouse with up to 4 different computers.

Sure, there are programs like Synergy that allow us to do that, even among different operating systems, but besides this project being from MS itself, it also offers windows users some nice features: such as the chance to simply drag and drop files across different computer screens to copy/move it from one place to the other.

HP WiFi Mouse

For the most part, computer mouses have remained unchanged since their invention. Sure, we let go of the dust gathering rubber balls and started using LED and Laser optical sensors. And we even ditched it's "tail", by evolving to wireless mouses.
But, for the most part, wireless mouses also came with some annoying drawbacks: you still had to use a receptor dongle on a USB port, and you'd have to start worrying about battery life and charging/recharging.

That's two things that HP might have taken care of with their WiFi Computer Mouse.

By using WiFi, it requires no special USB receiver dongle and can be used by any computer with WiFi connection; and as for the battery, HP claims up to 9 months battery life, which should be enough to make you forget about that as well.

The HP WiFi Mouse should be available from June onwards with a price of $49.99.

Mighty Mouse on your iPad

One of the great things about the iPad is its touch-friendly interface that allows easy interaction without requiring a keyboard or mouse. But there are still things better suited for a keyboard... Typing long texts is much more confortable when done with a physical keyboard - and while you're doing it, raising your hand to touch the screen becomes rather annoying. Why not fall back to using a regular mouse in that scenario?

That's exactly what someone thought of, using a bluetooth mouse with the iPad (a Magic Mouse in this case.)

Of course, you'll need to jailbreak your iPad in order to connect a bluetooth mouse to it... but at least you know you can do it.

Surface with Physical Keyboard

Here's an amazing project that uses Surface's digital projection with real world elements like mouses and keyboards.

It's the perfect example showing why we need to break free from the assumption that "one computer" equals "one keyboard, one mouse."
In the following video you'll see the amazing possibilities these new interfaces hold.



Prototype by Bjoern Hartman at UC Berkeley.

[via @Johnny Lee]