“Mouse 2.0″, or the next generation of the mulit-touch mouse concept, is currently under development from Microsoft Research. The mouse depicted in the picture to the left is the “FTIR” mouse, which applies the principle of Frustrated Total Internal Reflection to illuminate a user’s fingers. It uses a camera to track multiple points of touch on its curved translucent surface. What this allows a user to do is similar to the way you can manipulate web pages and applications on an iPhone. With an iPhone, you can utilize a “pinch” gesture to zoom out, and the reverse movement to zoom in on a page. Having the capability of tracking your fingertips would add this functionality for your personal computer. I would find this to be greatly usable instead of constantly having to adjust the zoom by going to the file menu at the top of a web page. The same holds true with applications. This mouse would solve that problem and eliminate the extra clicks needed to zoom. Some of the other concepts in the video below give even more features by tracking various movements in different ways. You can check out the FTIR mouse in action along with 4 other concepts in this long video brought to you from Microsoft. Which of these is the most appealing to you, and which mouse do you think will emerge as the standard?

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