New Direction in Computer Interaction: Is the Mouse Facing Extinction?
By emeadows
October 24, 2012
October 24, 2012
- Younger generations are growing up in a tablet and mobile world, and have little use for the computer mouse, first introduced at the Stanford Research Institute by Douglas Engelbart and Bill English in 1963.
- “This fall, for the first time, sales of iPads are cannibalizing sales of PCs in schools, according to Charles Wolf, an analyst for the investment research firm Needham & Co.,” writes The Washington Post.
- Whereas the mouse was once the “primary bridge to the virtual world,” it’s now becoming unnecessary as touchscreens, mobile devices and voice recognition software dominate the market.
- “Kindergartners, as young as 4, use the iPod Touch to learn letter sounds,” explains the article. “The older students use iPads to research historical information and prepare multimedia slide-show presentations about school rules.”
- “Even toddlers are able to manipulate a touch screen. A popular YouTube video shows a baby trying to swipe the pages of a fashion magazine that she assumes is a broken iPad.”
- “The popularity of iPads and other tablets is changing how society interacts with information,” notes Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “Direct manipulation with our fingers, rather than mediated through a keyboard/mouse, is intuitive and easy for children to grasp.”
- Could we be witnessing the final countdown for the computer mouse?
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