What you are seeing here is Puyocon, a ball-shaped device that could easily replace your mouse. Unlike your mouse, Puyocon isn’t dependent on rolling around on your desk to make your cursor move.
On the contrary, Puyocon prefers to be picked up and rolled, squeezed, or even thrown to get your cursor to where it needs to go. The ball has fourteen pressure sensors in all, plus a three-way acceleration sensor. It can be synced to your computer via Bluetooth.
Puyocon was developed by the Entertainment Computing Laboratory of Japan’s Tsukuba University. Apparently, they discovered that a young child’s method of squeezing things was a lot better use of an interface than a mouse or touchpad. You can check out the video after the jump, and decide for yourself if you feel that these guys are on to something.
I say, if you’re going to have a ball interface, why not have two balls? With one ball controller in your left hand, and another in your right, you’ll have an amazing ability to juggle all sorts of projects. Yes, that was a terrible joke, but I think you see my point.
A ball like the Puyocon that can interface with your computer is probably capable of a lot more inputs than a regular mouse, maybe even more than a gaming mouse. Now just imagine how much control a user could have with two mice.
Perhaps this is the future that Puyocon is imagining, but we shall see. In the meantime, this ball doesn’t look like its for sale anytime soon.
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