OK – gadget drool alert – but I love the look of the new Apple Magic Mouse, and I immediately wondered whether this couldn’t be some kind of middle ground between a mouse and the Space Navigator as an interface device for virtual worlds.
The new Magic Mouse allows clicks, 360 degree scrolling, screen zoom and swipes. I’m imagining using it to control your camera position in Second Life.
While Space Navigator also includes ‘up/down’ this seems like a pretty handy alternate interface. I’m not sure what it would take to map the controls from the mouse to those of Second Life or OpenSim, but surely it can’t be too difficult.
Am I headed to the Apple store tomorrow? Oh – and can someone hack it so it works with my home PC? See video after the jump.
Look out for updates to USB Overdrive (Mac only – http://www.usboverdrive.com ) to enable re-mapping of Magic Mouse gestures. I already use this to re-map SL keystrokes to my multi-button mouse and it’s totally indispensable, can’t function without it. I’m trying to find something that does the same thing on Windows and coming up blank, altho’ it must exist somewhere…
Apple will already have Windows drivers in development for the Magic Mouse because they’ll need to make it compatible with Mac’s switching into ‘doze in Bootcamp – so they should appear before long.