Shake The Mouse (1997)

gestural interface experiment

start over

This is admittedly an odd little piece. But if you can place it in time (1997), it's a very advanced experiment - unquestionably a nod towards Multi Touch long before anything like that was ever possible.

Back then we had just the one pointer (cursor/mouse) in the digital world, and since we, at Red Sky, weren't hardware developers (yet) we created this little software experiment, in an attempt to address the limits of the one-button mouse.

When this piece loads, an object floats on-screen and follows your cursor. If you click, you'll lay links on the stage.

Now, shake the mouse -

The "thing" goes away, and now each link you dropped is functional. (Or was then, rather).

The links aren't the big idea here - shaking the mouse is. Our thought was that it would be great if, through

some natural gesture, you could change the function of the cursor. Double the cursor's functionality, if you will.

Shaking the mouse - once you do it the first time, you'll find that it's a very natural action. Especially with the visual cue of an object attached to your cursor. It's what you would do in the real world if something were stuck to your finger.

We imagined creating two views or modes of the same content: an "Information Mode" and a "Shopping Mode" for example.

In the information mode- there's no advertising, no prices, no product names. If you rollover the action, you learn where, how, the history, etc. Then, shake the mouse, and you're flipped into shopping mode - all the same content, but now you can buy everything you see.

Look, I know, it was 1997. The heart of the Internet bubble and all that. But here's Multi Touch, and I like to think we were onto something.