The aptly named Mouseless is a way to use a mouse without the need for a physical lump o’ plastic cupped in your hands.  It consists of an infrared laser beam and an infrared camera which are installed on the computer you will be using.  The beam projects over the surface your hand will be on while the camera keeps track of the motion of your hand and fingers as the way that they break the plane of the beam changes.  MAKE:Blog didn’t find any open source plans for the Mouseless but do link to the inventor who is still tweaking the design.  With a better camera and more lasers they feel that the Mouseless will be capable of a lot more than a mere physical mouse.

“Love your mouse, but tired of having to cart it around everywhere? Well, then you might be interested in Mouseless, a project by Pranav Mistry of the MIT Fluid Interfaces Group. The project forgoes the physical device we think of as a mouse, replacing it with an infrared laser and webcam pair that allow you to mimic the gestures you would normally make with your button- adorned friend. It’s a pretty simple idea, really: the laser projects a line across your workspace, and the camera uses blob tracking to figure out where your hand is, and when you lift up a finger. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that they have released any source code- anyone want to try to re-build this using openFrameworks?”

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