Soap: A Pointing and Gaming Device for the Living Room and Anywhere Else

A unified mouse and mousepad that can be operated in mid-air. Soap is suitable for several off-the-desktop applications, such as wall displays, Windows Media Center, slide presentations, and video games.

Enhanced Life

Computers are moving into the living room and the classroom, but they are making those environments feel more like offices. Soap allows users to operate their computers while sitting, walking, or running, alleviating the need to create more office-like setups to support mouse usage.

Goals

To create a new input device that offers many of the benefits of a mouse and allows users to roam around freely.

Innovations

Soap demonstrates two novel approaches:

• The combination of a mouse and a mousepad in a single device.
  
  
• The device is controlled by users manipulating a hard object that floats inside a stretchy hull.

Contact

Patrick Baudisch
Microsoft Research
Baudisch (at) microsoft.com

Contributors

Mike Sinclair
Andrew Wilson
Microsoft Research