The explosion of touchscreen devices have not made the mouse
obsolete. But what if you could use your finger as a mouse on
any surface? That’s the point of Magic Finger, a concept device
made by a team from Autodesk Research and the University of
Toronto that can sense touch, motion and texture. The Magic
Finger is basically a micro RGB camera, an LED and an optical
mouse sensor cobbled together. Talk about ripping off the mouse.
Contrary to its name, the magic here seems to be in the
software. Aside from letting you point and click on any surface,
the camera can also recognize different textures, which the
researchers use in a variety of ways, such as reading data,
launching applications and controlling other devices. Watch the
dorky demo in the video below: I’m not too sold on the Magic
Finger for a couple of reasons. First of all the Magic Finger is
intrusive; the finger or hand wearing the device will be of
limited use because you don’t want to damage the Magic Finger.
Second, I don’t think the data matri