Texas Instruments (TI) showed off an interesting new mouse concept at the SXSW (South by South West) tech conference in Austin Texas this week. See the report and watch a short video at http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/10/ti-launchpad-mouse/ to see it in action.

Put together in half an hour by a couple of TI research staff it shows a completely airborn mouse that can output 3-diemsional movements to Windows - currently over USB. Clicks etc. are accomplished by rapidly shaking the device.

The device obviously opens up interesting possibilities for some disabled people as well as more generally across a number of fronts. Just imagine it, not connected via a USB wire but with a low power wireless connection. Pop it in a headband and your mouse cursor now follows your head movements. Someone with limited finger movements could just wear it on a bracelet and wave their arms!

TI are promising the idea will turn into an "interesting" product later this year. But if you fancy making one now, the prototype is built from just a couple of standard prototype controller boards available at your nearest TI stockist (try Farnell / element14 in the UK). I'm sure TI would be happy to provide a copy of the software to anyone interested.

Being a software based device, it would be trivially easy to alter its responsiveness (for example) to suit any individual application. And as the prototype boards are packed with all sorts of other sensors apart from the accelerometers used here the possibilities, as they say, for some inspirational new devices are endless.

Who was it who asked for a better vertical gaming mouse here recently? This offers the prospect of so much more.

George