SmartNav Hands Free mouse

Now here’s a good idea – a mouse you don’t touch. The Smart-Nav hands free mouse uses an infra-red camera to track your head movements. You reflect infra-red light back to the Smart-Nav, which sends instructions to your computer to move your mouse cursor.

The SmartNAV tracks reflections from a tiny dot, which you can place anywhere, preferably on your head, although you can place the dot on any part of your body you wish to control the mpouse with, which brings up some interesting possibilities I won’t go in to. According to the sellers, a hat or mic boom are the current favorites.

The SmartNAV usually sits on top of your monitor, facing you. But you can clip it to laptops or place it behind you. It can be placed anywhere as long as it can see whichever reflective accessory you’ve chosen to wear. Less than an inch of head movement is more than enough to move the cursor across your entire screen.

SmartNAV has a 30 degree Field Of View, and usuall sits about 2 feet away from your head. Thus you have at least a foot and a half of free “head space” in which to move that inch.

There are several verisions available, SmartNAV Basic users click with Hot Keys on their keyboard. These keys can be easily reassigned, or disabled. They can perform their function only while pressed, or they can toggle the function on and off.

If you purchase an EG or AT package, you can plug switches into the SmartNAV device for clicking. Infra-red light is emitted from the LEDs and is reflected back to the imager by a corner cube reflector. This reflected light is imaged by a CMOS sensor and the video signal is passed to the preprocessing electronics. The video signal is thresholded against a reference level and all passing data is sent to the USB microcontroller to send to the PC for object tracking. In order to increase the signal to noise ratio an IR filter that passes only 800nm and above is placed between the imager lens and the outside world. The Smart-Nav can image any IR source; typically this is reflective material or an active IR source such as an LED. A user may track many different objects by placing reflective dots or LEDs on the object. The Smart-Nav has a 30 degree field of view and anything being tracked must stay in that field of view.

This gadget really does hold some interesting possibilities, particularly if you have lost the use of your arms. Available exclusively from SmartHome USA. When I first saw the photos, I imagined some kid of goggles that you wear but it turns out to be very small, so I guessed completely wrong.