Six axis controller constructed from three mice

We've seen some rather interesting mouse mods in our day, with some admittedly being more worthwhile than others, but an engineering mind over at LushProjects has definitely raised the bar quite a bit with his latest. Dubbed Three Blind Mice, the project consisted of two waves and more work than he ever expected, but yielded a very successful six axis (not that SIXAXIS) controller to use in 3D graphics applications such as VVVV. After realizing that panning and shuffling around camera angles with a 2D mouse / keyboard tandem was wasting entirely too much of his life, he embarked on a journey to "run three threads round three rollers from old mechanical mice." After realizing that Windows wasn't exactly keen on making things easy, he diverted his efforts into connecting the mice to the PC via an AVR microcontroller connected to the serial bus. By adding weights to an "opto-mechanical mouse with two horizontal rollers," as well as mounting a shaft and shaft-encoder through the middle of a mouse, he was able to realize all axes and utilize "mind bending math" to translate the mice data to on-screen orientation. While the full skinny is entirely too complex to be covered here, be sure to hit the link if this stuff suits your fancy, but make sure you've got oodles of time before even considering duplicating this one at home.

[Thanks, Harry]

[strider_mt2k @ Nov 27th 2006 8:13AM]

Nice work!

Hack on, my brother!

[Nick G @ Nov 27th 2006 9:43AM]

I don't think this is really anything new. I use 3D applications for work and use a SpacePilot from 3DConnexion whick works as a six axis controller.

[Keith Hoard @ Nov 27th 2006 10:06AM]

Man, I clicked on this article from Google expecting to see three white lab mice with wires sticking out of their tiny little skulls. . . bummer!!

[Andir3.0 @ Nov 27th 2006 10:31AM]

The question is:

Were those three mice blind?

[Joe @ Nov 27th 2006 11:59AM]

Here's a somewhat easier, but more limited implementation that some Microsoft researchers published back in '99:
The VideoMouse: A Camera-Based Multi-Degree-of-Freedom Input Device
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/301249.html

[Bennit @ Nov 27th 2006 5:30PM]

i just had a look at that vvvv software mentioned in the article seems woth checking.
http://vvvv.org/
http://vvvv.org/tiki-view_blog.php?blogId=4

[Dave Pevsner @ Nov 27th 2006 5:48PM]

the next question is, will they be able to use three blind mice for gaming? since a PC with a BD player and a six axis controller does the same thing as a PS3 with the SIXAXIS, but allows you to run x86 OS'es natively (if you'll excuse the pun) to boot.

[Matt @ Nov 27th 2006 8:34PM]

SIXAXIS is the worst name ever.