Chapter NUI-9.   Using Multiple Mice

This chapter does not appear in the book.

Multitouch envy is a dangerous emotion for laptop and PC users, and tends to make us forget the excessive effort required to keep lifting your hand (or even both hands, heavens forbid!) up to the screen to move, resize and rotate stuff.

One aspect of a multitouch interface might be helpful – the ability to have more than one cursor active on the screen at once. Imagine plugging two mice into a PC and have them appear on screen as two cursors. In fact, most laptops users already employ two input devices, a mouse and a touch pad, but linked to a single, jointly shared, cursor.

Multiple mice (by which I really mean multiple on-screen cursors) are possible in Java by interacting with them via the JInput library. I'll go through three examples in this chapter:

• MiceReporter, which lists all the 'mouse controllers' detected by JInput; JInput's definition of a mouse is quite generous, so MiceReporter will list touch pads and Thinkpad-style pointing sticks as well.
   
• MouseController, which monitors a mouse selected by the user, printing out changes to its buttons, position, and middle wheel.
   
• Multitouch, a graphical application, shown in the picture at the top of the page, which lets the user move, resize and rotate images with two 'finger tips'. Each finger tip is a cursor in the shape of a finger print, and is controlled by a different mouse (or a touch pad and mouse on my laptop).

Downloads

• The PDF file for the draft chapter (396 KB). Last updated: 29th August 2012.
  
• Zipped code (680 KB). Last updated: 29th August 2012.
  

• Up to the Killer Game Programming in Java Index Page
• Back to Chapter NUI-6.5. TopCodes and the Robot Arm
• On to Chapter NUI-10. Reading Your Mind with the MindWave