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From: info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac)
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: Re: Keyboard: 2 limbs, Mouse: 1 limb < Humans: 4 limbs
Message-ID: <2406@uw-beaver>
Date: Mon, 3-Dec-84 00:04:54 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.2406
Posted: Mon Dec  3 00:04:54 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 4-Dec-84 19:16:18 EST
Sender: daemon@uw-beave
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 84

From: John W. Peterson 

Yes, people have done research on foot mice.  This is reprinted from
the WorkS list.  It's by Doug Engelbart, who invented the hand mouse at SRI.

Date: 14-May-84 11:43 PDT
From: DCE.TYM@OFFICE-2.ARPA
Subject: Foot mouse, knee controller, nose pointer; more research
Cc: WBD.TYM@OFFICE-2.ARPA, KIRK.TYM@OFFICE-2.ARPA

Re: WORKS Digest   V4 #22

At SRI in the 60's we did some experimenting with a foot mouse.  I
found that it was workable, but my control wasn't very fine and my
leg tended to cramp from the unusual posture and task.  I assume that
these would be overcome eventually by practice.

I got to thinking about skill development with fine foot control, and
realized that most of us developed a very high degree of fine control
with the accelerator pedal.  I tried controlling vertical cursor
position with such a pedal, and it worked quite well.  Thinking about
concurrent horizontal control, I realized that I can swing my knee
from side to side with fairly good control (in terms of fraction of
total range of swing).  That worked fairly well, better I found than
with the foot mouse.

Then I migrated the vertical actuator from the floor pedal to an
up-down bar actuated by the knee -- which, I reasoned, was controlled
by foot/ankle actions against the immovable floor (to raise or lower
the knee) that would be essentially the same as when using a pedal.
So we had a compound pair of actuators operated by a knee -- up and
down for vertical cursor control, right and left for horizontal.  It
was natural to learn, and gave better control immediately than did
the foot mouse (I believed we called the latter our "skate"), but I
tended to get leg cramps from this as well as the vskate.

About that time I also rigged up a mechanism that utilized a
light-weight helmet for the user to wear: turning his head from side
to side would move the cursor horizontally, and nodding the head up
and down would move the cursor vertically.
  This looks a bit strange, but it worked.  AND this also gave me
cramps, in the neck, after ten minutes or so.

I don't think that our experiences would be enough to discard any of
these possibilities from a list of research candidates.  The cramping
I think would pass as skill developed, and the degree of control
achievable has to be judged after more practice than we gave
ourselves.  The hand mouse didn't have these early problems, and gave
good results with considerably less practice than these devices
seemed to require to get past the cramping stage.

We thought about eye control, but at the time didn't want to spend
the money to implement it.

We had many things, at other levels and domains of an "augmentation
system" that I wanted to explore, besides the best means for
concurrent screen-selection and character-entry operation.  We
finally settled for the mouse in one hand and the chord keyset in the
other -- and went on with the other system pursuits.

I have no particular conviction that the hand-controlled mouse will
be the best screen-select control means that will emerge; and I
applaud any pursuit of better means.

I assume that the end objective is for best over-all, concurrent
control & input means. Perhaps a combination of eye pointing, hand
controls (including character input), and coded-voice input might be
the winner -- or even more parallel motor channels?  Any such system
would have to be evaluated for a specific working context, though.
For instance, what is best would depend upon such things as the level
of user training assumed, the responsiveness of the system, how much
concurrency can be harnessed in simultaneous task pursuit by the
system, the range of media being handled (e.g., text, graphics,
color, dynamics, voice, video frames, people-intercom control,) etc..

Doug Engelbart,  Tymshare

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End of WORKS Digest
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