Why

I created Precision Gaze Mouse because I have a repetitive use injury after many hours of using my regular mouse. Ergonomic mice didn’t help me either. I didn’t want to be limited by my problem, so I created a better solution. I also made it free and open source to help as many people as possible.

What’s wrong with regular mice?

Regular mice can be slow to operate because you need to constantly switch your hands back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse. They can also cause repetitive use injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome. Additionally, people with diseases like peripheral neuropathy, ALS, spinal cord injury and others may find operating a mouse with their hands difficult or even impossible.

What about other no-hands mice?

Head tracking mice like NaturalPoint’s SmartNav require you to wear an inconvienient reflective dot on your head. Also, you must set the sensitivity high enough to select a single character, which requires wide head rotations to move the pointer across the entire screen. This makes moving the mouse slower and can cause muscle fatigue after many hours per day.

Gaze tracking mice like Tobii’s PCEye have a camera that can look at your eyes and determine where on the screen they are pointing. Eye gaze is very fast because eyes can quickly move to fix on a point. However, it’s only accurate within 1-4 cm because your eyes naturally move around when you look at a fixed point, even though you don’t notice it happening. Matching the mouse pointer directly to your eye movement results in jitter, making it hard to click precisely. It’s also difficult to calibrate the eye tracking across a large screen, resulting in reduced accuracy near the corners where you eye is most rotated. Tobii’s solution is to have a two-step process where you first gaze at a control bar to turn on clicking, then gaze where you want to click and it zooms in on the exact point. These extra steps make it slower to click.