Hasta La Gadget!

If spotting a cop
in your rearview mirror tends to make you tremble now, just wait. Fed up with earbud-wearing, cell phone-yakking motorists who don’t heed sirens, police across the country are turning to a new attention-getting tool–low-frequency sound waves so strong they can actually be felt up to 200 feet away. “It feels like a tremor inside the vehicle,” says Tom Morgan, police market vice president for Federal Signal, which makes the seismic sirens.

Dubbed the Rumbler, the system emits a 10-second, 109-decibel burst through two subwoofers mounted on the patrol car’s bumper. The idea is that when a cruiser pulls up behind a distracted driver, the hit of bone-rattling whomp will get the space-case to glance up from text-messaging long enough to realize there’s an official vehicle bearing down.

So far, more than 200 police and
sheriff departments nationwide have bought thousands
of the $400 setups, and a hundred more are trying them out.
What if the sonic booms don’t work? Well, the cops could always try adding some hydraulics to bounce the front end up and down to the beat.

: Photo: Courtesy SRI International

The computer mouse made its worldwide debut 40 years ago in a presentation by Stanford Research Institute engineer Douglas Engelbart. Later called “the mother of all demos,” it was a groundbreaking demonstration of how computers could help ordinary people work together, think better and — hopefully — make solving the world’s problems that much easier.

But it was the mouse that people really latched onto. Billions of mice later, it still rules the desktop, second only to the keyboard as the most ubiquitous input device of all time.

But mice — and related input devices — come in all shapes and sizes. In this gallery, Wired.com takes a look at some of the more awe-inspiring (and guffaw-inspiring) inventions aimed at helping you get your thoughts out of your brain and into the Matrix.

Left: Engelbart’s first mouse was carved out of a block of wood and had just one button, just like Apple’s. Underneath were two wheels connected to potentiometers: One recorded the mouse’s movement along the x axis, the other one tracked the y axis.

: Photo: Courtesy Bootstrap Institute

Before settling on the hand-controlled mouse, Engelbart’s lab investigated other possibilities, including the “knee mouse” shown here. Engelbart later said in an interview that the knee controller “was based on my observation that the human foot was a pretty sensitive controller of the gas pedal in cars. With a little work, we discovered that the knee offered even better control at slight movements in all directions. In tests, it outperformed the mouse by a small margin.” However, its slight performance advantage was no doubt outweighed by the fact that it was really, really goofy.

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Mice may have been used here and there in research labs like Xerox PARC, but they didn’t hit the big time until Apple released its revolutionary Macintosh in 1984. It was the first consumer computer to use a truly rich graphical user interface — and a one-button mouse was a standard part of the package. The mouse was so much a part of the Mac’s unique identity that Apple didn’t even include arrow keys on the computer’s keyboard.

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Apple has since relented, but for years the company drove its customers up the wall by refusing to put more than a single button on its mice. That meant you had to buy mice from Logitech, Macally or — gasp — Microsoft if you wanted to take advantage of many applications’ right-click capabilities. But Apple’s worst mouse misstep? Making a translucent and perfectly circular one-button mouse for the G3 iMacs. With the shape of a hockey puck, the mouse made it much too easy for eyes-on-the-screen users to wind up grasping the mouse at a slant, sending their cursors zooming northeast when they meant to go southeast. Arrgh!

: Photo: Courtesy Royal Canadian Navy

The world’s first trackball actually predates Engelbart’s mouse by more than a decade, and it was invented by Canadians, no less. Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor developed this elaborate gizmo for a Canadian Navy project in 1952. For the rotating part, it used a standard bowling ball from Canada’s unique five-pin game. There’s no word on whether it was ever used for aiming Canadian anti-missile defense systems, Missile Command-style.

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Some videogame players suffer an inconvenient and disabling malady: Just as the action gets hot and heavy, their ability to shoot straight is thrown off by a physiological malfunction. Yes, we’re talking about sweaty palms. Nyko’s AirFlo comes to the rescue, with a built-in fan that blows cooling air onto your mouse hand, helping its grip remain firm and sweat-free.

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Graphics tablets that let you draw electronic images by tracing lines on a flat surface go as far back as 1888, or as far as 1957 in the modern computer age. But they didn’t hit the consumer market until Koala Technologies introduced its KoalaPad for the Apple II in 1984. It also later supported the TRS-80, Atari, Commodore 64 and IBM PC. With its bundled drawing software, the KoalaPad was a hit among artists and school kids.

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Who wouldn’t want to have a big, chunky, silver metal knob on their desk? Reminiscent of the volume knob on an old stereo, the PowerMate is a USB peripheral that can be configured to control your computer’s volume, “scrub” back and forth in video-editing software or scroll through text documents. Best of all, its functions are app-specific, so you can make it do different things depending on which program you’re using. It’s even got ground effects: A blue LED light glows brighter or dimmer depending on the level you’re dialing in.

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Also known as a touchpad, this flat sensor replicates the effect of a mouse by letting you drag your fingers across its surface to control a pointer on the screen. The trackpad made its first appearance in a laptop with the Apple PowerBook 500 in 1994, and has since become nearly ubiquitous on notebook computers and netbooks. Recent tweaks to the technology have included multitouch support (so you can use more than one finger at a time) and even limited display capabilities using the pad’s embedded status lights.

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Perhaps the most reviled pointing device ever, the TrackPoint was invented by IBM for use in its line of ThinkPad notebooks. It had the advantage of being compact, requiring far less space than a touchpad. With a little practice, it was also a reasonably efficient and ergonomic controller. On the downside, many people found it difficult to use, it was useless for anything that required finesse (like drawing applications), and it just plain felt weird. As a result, the TrackPoint collected a wide range of nicknames, of which we’ll list just a few of the more printable ones: cat’s tongue, nub, nubby mouse, pointing stick, stick mouse, stupid little red pointer, nipple mouse.

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Everyone who has had to rely on a mouse, trackball or digitizer tablet fantasizes at some point about a device that would let you control the cursor without having to take your hands off the keyboard. Like, for instance, a foot mouse! Bili’s Foot Mouse/Slipper Mouse fits the bill, and it’s even programmable, so you can assign different functions to each of the buttons. However, at $199, it’s a little pricey for most of us.

: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

The Falcon Novint looks like a menacing alien orb held delicately by a three-fingered metal claw, with a pistol grip on the end. But grab the grip and dive into your favorite first-person shooter and it becomes an awesome 3-D controller, complete with realistic force feedback — so you can actually feel the recoil when you pull the trigger. Game on!

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Brainwave-reading devices like the Emotiv EPOC and NeuroSky promise to take human-computer interfaces to the next level by letting you control an application (or better yet, a game) simply through the power of thought. While there’s still a lot of work to be done, these technologies hold the greatest promise of helping us truly jack in to cyberspace.