Sometimes traditional input devices just don’t cut it. I’ve never been big on the touchpad mouse, but sometimes using a traditional mouse can be annoying when you can’t spare that whole hand because you need it on the keyboard. For typing, you guys. Particularly, activities like peddling between tabs in Chrome can be obnoxious while typing. Especially if you have a dozen open. The same goes for highlighting text. It’s a small annoyance to grab the mouse and then go back to the keyboard, but it’s a very common one. That’s where the foot pedal mouse comes in. It can solve all those problems for you, that is, if it’s at all usable.
The foot mouse delegates different aspects of the complex art of mousing to each of your feet. The right foot is in control of cursor movement by manipulating the pedal that, thanks to a hinge and a ball bearing, can move left and right as well as up and down. The clicking is the left foot’s job. The foot mouse has four “buttons” activated by moving the toes on your right foot left, right, up, or down.
This foot mouse is clearly a DIY joint, so if you’re interested in using one, you’ll have to whip it up yourself. The upside is that, due to you building it yourself, the fidelity of the control is all up to you. The downside, though, is that means the fidelity of the control is all up to you. It seems like a long way to go to keep your right hand free (for keyboard usage and keyboard usage only!), but it seems slightly more intuitive than trying to map everything to your keyboard. Until we have futuristic eye-controlled mice, this might be the closest you’ll get to having two dedicated hands for the keyboard. Also you get to make jokes about stepping on or kicking mice as an added bonus.
(via Hack a Day)
