To echo the parent post let me assure you as a freelancer that the only difference between a freelancer and a fulltimer is that the freelancer's resume is more up to date.

"Job security" is an illusion.

Let's compare this with something like WoW where the "patrons" pay a monthly fee and a significant portion of their life for the privilege of clicking their mouse a few thousand times just so they can make their name go bigger on a "virtual plaque".

Oh yeah, this guy's definitely got a monopoly on swindling brainless people...

If you consider this to be "encrypted" then I don't know what to tell you. It's a pretty simple piece to wrap your head around.

I'm going to post this on my YouFace page immediately! FingerTag me for details.

The problem is the material dictates much of the design. For FTIR to function, the curvature of the clear material must be such that the angle of refraction causes the light inside it to bounce back from the surface internally instead of escaping, like a superball in a narrow hallway. This means you need both a material with a high refractive index (i.e. Poly Methyl MethAcrylate aka Lucite/Plexiglas) and a shape that propigates the light beam. This then will dicate the overall design of the mouse.

Which means features such as handedness ergonomics will be difficult to do with this design. All the existing designs on the market would need to be modified to accomodate it. The process and materials involved in attaching the lightpipe to the base may not be easy or cheap. The shape they use at least in this demo will have issues with the front wanting to drag from the low area of contact with the desk relative to the pressure. And since it's a brittle material, I'm betting that thin arch with nothing supporting it will crack from stress as it ages, rendering the mouse useless in a much shorter time than users fine satisfactory.

Buy an acrylic cup from the supermarket and use it. See how long it takes it to develop the first cracks. Now assume any crack over 1mm will cause a diffraction of the light beam rendering the whole thing useless. I'm betting an optimistic 6 month product life is not ideal for a mouse.

Oh and the fad for "green" everything will hate it, since PMMA takes twice its weight in petroleum to produce.

Ok, I did. The FTIR seems to have this issue, so does the side mouse. The orb clearly DOES NOT, as you can see from the sensor image that his fingers are on it most of the time. The cap mouse is tricky to tell due to the video length and quality but if you look at 2:24 it seems like his fingers are on it while moving the pointer to the window before clicking to drag, just like a regular mouse. Arty also does not have this issue.

Now, please go and actually use a touchpad. They work like I've described. The hovering finger problem can be solved in drivers by coding for differential activation. Which behavior do you think will be in a final product, the one that's in a lab prototype that causes discomfort, or the one that's been an established industry standard for a decade?

I just realized something. If the "orb" mouse becomes common, it's going to need a tactile indicator for hand alignment. Like the little raised bumps keyboards usually have on the home keys so you can find the default position by feel.

If it doesn't get named the boob mouse after that, I'll eat one.

Not true. Put your finger on a touchpad and hold it there. Does the mouse move continuously? Does it continually click from the double-tap function?

No, because it works on a differential. So resting your fingers on the mouse as normal is fine. There may be a bit of an issue about registering clicks, which will take either pressure sensitivity at a basic (binary) level, or a change in user habits to lift the mouse and put it down again as the click action instead of the reverse.

But I think most likely some smart manufacturer will just put the capacitive surface over existing mouse buttons, which are wired to their normal function. People will still want the tactile click feedback, and this does not impair the functionality of the capacitive surface.

If there's no reason the choice must be exclusive, then the choice will be both.

Nope, there have been keyboards with trackpads for quite a long time now. Also, how are sales of USB trackpads for desktops? I remember buying a 9 pin serial port based one back when they just came out and were the hot new things. But I found it wasn't all that great.

The main reason I don't see touchpads taking over desktops is a simple one. A touchpad requires you to use fingers for both positioning AND clicking. It's an overloaded operation. What was one of the earliest improvements to touchpad design? The ability to tap to emulate a left click. Because it's a royal pain to position with fingers and click with the thumb, it makes common operations like dragging difficult and imprecise. Then throw in scrollwheel functionality and ugh! The reason it flourishes in laptops is because it doesn't require any space to operate, and most people wouldn't use a laptop they couldn't use on a lap. The eraser nub mice lost out because their control precision was even worse than the touchpad.

If people aren't buying aftermarket touchpads for their desktops in significant numbers let alone more than mice, I don't see the evidence for an actual user preference of the touchpad over the mouse. The market's had more than long enough for that kind of bias to assert itself and it hasn't.

The natural extension of multi-button mania is infinite buttons, i.e. a continuous surface. So is it a surprise that it's come to this?

I agree that the flat panel to mouse mapping may be akward since the mouse isn't flat. It's the main reason I favor the orb-shape on they showed, since it's got its own potential for a lot of interesting things, and has enough area that you could fit a lot of control functionality on it. But I think it will lose out on appeal and cost. I'd love it if at least one gets to market though, it looks like someone took the old SpaceOrb controller and did it right.