New Direction in Computer Interaction: Is the Mouse Facing Extinction?

By emeadows
October 24, 2012

Younger generations are growing up in a tablet and mobile world, and have little use for the computer mouse, first introduced at the Stanford Research Institute by Douglas Engelbart and Bill English in 1963.
“This fall, for the first time, sales of iPads are cannibalizing sales of PCs in schools, according to Charles Wolf, an analyst for the investment research firm Needham & Co.,” writes The Washington Post.
Whereas the mouse was once the “primary bridge to the virtual world,” it’s now becoming unnecessary as touchscreens, mobile devices and voice recognition software dominate the market.
“Kindergartners, as young as 4, use the iPod Touch to learn letter sounds,” explains the article. “The older students use iPads to research historical information and prepare multimedia slide-show presentations about school rules.”
“Even toddlers are able to manipulate a touch screen. A popular YouTube video shows a baby trying to swipe the pages of a fashion magazine that she assumes is a broken iPad.”
“The popularity of iPads and other tablets is changing how society interacts with information,” notes Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “Direct manipulation with our fingers, rather than mediated through a keyboard/mouse, is intuitive and easy for children to grasp.”
Could we be witnessing the final countdown for the computer mouse?

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