In the enthusiast gaming market we see a plethora of input devices that push our abilities to the limits. In the past few years a few companies have created mice that have extremely high dpi and more buttons than you have on your hand. This is all well and good, but they have done little to make any real advancements in way of usability. New input technology should make you play smarter, not harder. I know a few people that would rather play games competitively with a MS Optical Intellimouse than the newest mouse from Razer or Logitech.

I currently use a R2 Mark II from Good Work Systems (GWS) which completely blows away any other gaming mouse I have used. So, I was elated to hear that GWS will be releasing a very powerful new iteration of their R2 and Fragpedal technology in November. This will be the largest single release by far of new features for GWS. It will be based on a new cutting-edge 32 bit microprocessor just released by ST Microelectronics.

The new R2 mouse is the R2 Mark III Omnimouse, and the name says it all. It will completely own your PC on behalf of your input strategy(s). It controls the keyboard, the sound system, the monitor, unites the Fragpedal and R2 as one device and even listens to the games and applications, reading their data for your possible use. It no longer needs only buttons for macros, but can just “do things” on its own, reading subtle triggers from mouse movement, direction, speed, the count of button presses or other events and any sort of timing relationships.  It’s all conditional evaluation. Also, there is dynamic recording of the keyboard/mouse/Fragpedal suite with full editing to speed up, truncate, join and otherwise modify recordings.

There are some things it can do that will fundamentally change the way we play games, so this is going to be a “very interesting and controversial product”. The words that personally come to my mind are revolutionary and customizable which are two things that any hardcore gamer likes to hear.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.