Logitech iFeel Mouses (2001) | Hacker News Reader

Logitech iFeel Mouses (2001)

dansdata.com

48 pointsxattt37 comments

I vaguely remember that the game Black & White [0] was one of the first games to have special support for this mouse, and maybe even had a bonus level that relied on the iFeel tech. (It was a long time ago) I also remember being kind of amazed at how well the technology worked.

Despite Dan's Data pish-poshing, I remember a demo where the screen had different textured surfaces (sandpaper, bumps, wood, glass) and when you moved the pointer over those, the vibrations made it feel like you really were moving over those surfaces. It was kind of a gimmick, but in this day and age of game hardware designed to just be "cool", it feels like it could come back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%26_White_(video_game)

> It was kind of a gimmick, but in this day and age of game hardware designed to just be "cool", it feels like it could come back.

Smartphone manufacturers are looking at this precisely to generate textured sensations on the glass surface, so one could for example feel the surface of UI elements(1), or feel the sensation of materials with a stylus(2):

(1) https://www.cultofmac.com/661962/haptic-feedback-could-make-...

(2)https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/07/30/apple-invents-sty...

I had one of these! I bet it's still in a box somewhere. It worked quite well... but not in anything after WinXP, sadly, and never in Linux.

It worked quite well. It was handy to be able to feel the mouse "drop" into the trough of a scroll bar, and then bump back out again -- you could aim by feel, without looking.

BTW, if anyone is wondering why you'd want to aim at a scrollbar when you have a wheelmouse -- well, as an example, so you can click in the blank space above or below the scroll "thumb" and jump directly to that point in the document.

I bought my iFeel mouse -- the symmetrical model, because I'm left-handed -- at discount, because I needed a new USB rodent. Unfortunately for my unit and its advanced functionality, WinXP is also what pushed me over to switching to Linux full-time, supplemented by Mac OS X on an elderly hand-me-down PowerMac G3.

So I didn't run it under XP much, and on Linux or OS X, the iFeel was a bog-standard USB mouse with no additional functions.

Why the actual heck doesn't this still exist????? Mouse technology seems to have stagnated. Some tasks I suspect could have at least 5% time savings with some better aim assist. Almost all games would benefit from textures.

There are probably dozens of things a mouse would have if they kept pace with other tech.

Where's the heart rate sensor so games can have stress level mechanics? The tiny screen so you can pick it up and use it as a remote? The little camera for QR and barcodes? The NFC reader and qi charging?

Most users use them all day, but keyboards get all the innovation.

My best guess are patent barriers from Immersion. I would guess they want per seat licensing and that doesn’t with manufacturers who want to ship OSes by the truckload.

> you can get feedback whenever the mouse moves onto a clickable thing on the screen - a window, an icon, things on the Taskbar - and you can also get feedback when you're performing tasks like sizing a window or moving a scroll bar.

MacBook trackpads already use haptic feedback to simulate the tactile feel of clicking.

So in theory you could easily replicate the "iFeel Mouse" effects with the hardware in trackpads today.

Does macOS expose API's for any of this? Or has anyone figured out a way to hack it with code? Or is it all hidden away deep in inaccessible firmware?

I would be exceptionally curious to know what it feels like, if whenever I moved my cursor across the tab bar of my browser, I felt a tiny bump between each tab. Or if I felt a little indentation when I slid into a text box.

It's easy to imagine it would become very distracting very quickly if it were overdone, but I can't help but wonder if it could be done in a subtle way that actually felt natural and helpful?

There is an API available for haptic feedback through the touchpad, but I can only recall it being used when the pad is "pressed" (i.e. when you are dragging) - many graphics or design tools use it to create a "notch" when items align.

PowerPoint has this for example - dragging something around to move it will give a haptic click when aligned with center or another object.

It would be interesting to see if this API can be used when the user isn't dragging something to move it.

Edit - this seems to be the API - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nshapticfee...

Apple's force touch trackpads are still wild to me. The fake button they used on the iPhone 7 and 8 wasn't particularly convincing to me, they kinda just feel like the bottom of the phone is vibrating. But the trackpads are so uncanny I almost didn't believe it wasn't moving until I tried clicking while the machine was powered off and it didn't do anything.

Also the fact that you can click in, and then do a further harder click that feels like a harder bump "in" than the first one, and when you start releasing pressure the click intensities reverse "out" as you'd expect. I usually use my laptop docked at a monitor with a full keyboard and mouse, but when I am undocked I find myself frequently playing with the trackpad click cause it's still so novel to me.

It's always fun to tell more casual MacBook users that the trackpad doesn't actually click cause they usually have no idea.

I'll still never understand why Samsung dropped the same tech. Take a galaxy S8 and push in where the physical home button used to be and it clicks in an incredibly realistic manner. Long since dropped it though. Terrible shame, since it was by far the best way to turn the phone on.

I wonder how much battery power the thumping consumes. It is very convincing, to be sure. For the most part I'd prefer real switches, but haptic feedback when moving the cursor across UI elements can be pretty cool. Can't say I've encountered it in any applications I use, though.

There are two major failures with the MacBooks' trackpads:

1. They're too big. You can't put your hands on home row without frequent spurious UI interactions. Most often this is a click being erroneously interpreted as a right-click, because the pad detects that your non-clicking hand is still in contact with the pad. But frequently when I'm typing, the cursor jumps to some other part of the page or edit box. There's just no reason for such a large horizontal area; you essentially never use the whole width of this giant pad for horizontal scrolling or side-to-side movement.

2. The giant trackpad can't be used with the Pencil. This is just baffling. Its surface area is plenty big enough to be useful as a drawing tablet, but the Pencil doesn't work on it. Why? I'd buy a Pencil today if it did. At least then there'd be a payoff for the dumb size of the pad.

None. Because my iFeel, anyway, is a basic wired USB mouse. It doesn't have batteries at all.

OK but that was about the trackpad on MacBook Pros...

Oh I see!

That was not apparent to me. I thought you asked, then changed subject to the trackpad...

Yes, there is an API for this in macOS, and I use it in two of my apps (multitouch.app and charmstone.app). The haptic feedback is really subtle though and it doesn't give the full power of the feedback that is in the trackpad, which limits the usefulness of it. You can make it buzz for longer durations to make it more apparent, but then it starts to get annoying. I think there is a private framework that can give you stronger haptic feedback, if I remember right (I avoid private frameworks).

There must be an API because I've seen (felt?) it used recently. I can't remember what app it was, one I just have tried one time. It had a knob like control and as you dragged around it made the trackpad click like a real knob might as you turn it. I didn't find this very compelling, would rather a slider.

My brother got me one of these as a present when I was a teenager. The only game I remember that had full support was the god game Black & White. You controlled everything with a hand including interacting with the creature and moving/destroying things in the world. Each different action and object you picked up had a different “feeling” and it was surprisingly believable. I remember “furry” vs picking up wheat was similar but the wheat was “sharper” as expected and was really impressed. I wish I still had the mouse but from memory the motors failed, I think in part due to living in a tropical part of the world near the ocean, but not sure. Good times.

I had that game on optical media back then. I wonder if it still exists - now I kind of want to play it.

Unreal Tournament also worked well with the ifeel mouse.

Dan's Data - there's a name I've not heard in decades!

I used to love reading his columns in the pages of atomic mpc. A name that always makes me smile.

Same. Does anyone know what happened to Dan? Last post in 2015.

He keeps a fairly active Twitter presence:

https://twitter.com/dansdata

Definitely someone I would want to have a beer with!

I loved that blog, was one of my favorites back in the day along with the lovely daily cartoons at userfriendly.org and of course the old slashdot.

Yeah I miss that site something awful. Great random but usually techie nerdy content.

Hahaha, oh man. This reminds me of all the naughty stuff people did with the Novint Falcon. It was another failed feedback device that at its height could simultaneously be associated with the Half-Life series and adult toys.

And yet console controllers have vibration feedback as a standard feature and have for YEARS and years now, without people making an outsized stink about the potential naughty applications.

I wonder why that is?

Who cares? Rez literally released an honest to God vibrator as a legitimate product, I think for no other reason than to stir up noise.

People will find whatever the hell the want to use to get off, always have, always will.

I remember there was a ahem review of the Rez Trance Vibrator on a gaming site when that particular peripheral was released.

I worked at Immersion on the technologies behind this product!

My team worked on Developer Evangelism. We had SDKs for adding haptics to games, using C++, Flash, or ActiveX controls. There was also a touch effect authoring tool. We also helped integrate the tech directly into developer's codebases (they'd give us the source).

Much of my job was also going to trade shows and demonstrating the technology. The concept of touching a computer has to be experienced to be truly understood.

We also did medical simulation, automotive, and other things. We created everything for haptics, from new sensors and actuators, to power electronics, to force-feedback system architectures, to drivers, to the tools / sdks.

I also helped on the "touch the desktop" part of this product. It used Active Accessibility, effectively laying haptic rectangles upon their callbacks. I also was on the W3C Accessibility Working group as our technology naturally applied to some assistive technologies.

The technology in this iFeel mouse is effectively what is in the PS and Nintendo controllers. The innovation of the actuator is that it could have good control of both frequency and amplitude.

This mouse product was cool but didn't take off. It provided actual force feedback and had a very cool custom-designed magnetic system. It works similarly to how the Lexus haptic tech works: https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=13...

Also much of my early work there (and in college) was in 3D haptics and haptic rendering (triangles or voxels -> forces).

For one reason or another, these mice seemed like an amazing feat of technology at the time. I’m disappointed they never caught on.

The idea was better than the execution sadly. I had one of those mice and it never really felt like you gained much with the vibrations etc. I'm sure had it been more widely adopted it might have become much closer to the promise.

I had one and I loved it. Too bad they stopped making them.

Imagine being able to feel a grid that you want to snap something on to. It was great.

Having the mouse/trackpad react when you hover over a clickable thing is not a bad idea - especially given the sort of flat, affordance free UIs that are popular these days. I find myself habitually flinging the pointer around constantly to see where clickable things are. I could fling the pointer around without looking at it.

This reminds me a lot of what Lexus used to do in their cars. Their Remote Touch interface was literally a mouse with a pointer and the mouse would latch onto buttons as you moved the pointer around the screen. Very odd infotainment interface haha

blocked by malwarebytes wonder why

Mice?

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