I’ve long been annoyed by mice. First it was the cables, and now it’s the speed at which it eats through batteries. Sure, I could get a rechargeable mouse, or even rechargeable batteries – but I’m still consuming far more power than I think necessary.
We’ve seen kinetic watches thanks to Swatch, so why not produce a kinetic mouse? It gets moved a lot, and all of that movement could go toward charging it.
The few problems that I can think of are mostly related to the mouse’s off-state. When a laser mouse is ‘inactive’ it’s constantly scanning in order to see if it’s being used or not. This would obviously discharge a kinetically-powered mouse rather quickly, so a simple solution would be an on-off switch on its base.
But, I don’t like simple solutions. An elegant, jaw-droppingly cool solution would be to build a heat – or touch – sensitive pad onto the top of the mouse. When that detects a hand on top it switches the mouse on, well, it switches the laser on. The mouse would in effect be always-on.
The only reason I can see that this isn’t in production already is production cost. Kinetic power obviously requires a lot of research and meticulous mechanics, so unless it’s a guaranteed success I think firms willing to undertake its invention and production would be few and far between.