Haven't had time to play since last Feb or so, and won't be able to for a while longer, so here is the next best thing: some mental masturbation.

Back in the early 2000's, when I was decently competitive by NA standards, I used to brainstorm about ways to improve the connection between player and game. Mouse input felt - and still feels - suboptimal and ripe for improvement. Now, I never got around to attempting to jury rig even the simplest of these ideas, but I've occasionally wondered if any of them would have had real potential.

So, without further adieu, here are some of my ideas (in order from most practical to least). And I'm wondering if others have thought along similar lines.


Switch playing hands. This barely even qualifies for the list, but I will briefly mention it. Like many other players, I'm left-handed but mouse with my right hand because that it is the convention. The default WASD config encourages right-handed mousing, so that is what I started with. By the time it dawned on me that I might have improved aim if I moused with my dominant hand, it was too late. Late in my QW career I attempted to play left-handed for a week, but it was too radical of a change. It probably would have taken me six months to relearn all my movements, and it just wasn't going to happen at that point.


Use TWO mice at the same time. I've long wondered if isolating X movement and Y movement to different hands (and different mice) might improve movement and aim. While there are drawbacks (that I will mention below), I can think of a few benefits to this sort of setup: (1) the player could use a different sort of mouse grip (fingertip vs palm, etc) for each axis; (2) the player could use a mouse more conducive to up and down movement for the y-axis; (3) jittery-ness may decrease (it is very difficult to move a single mouse completely along just one axis); (4) precision may increase due to a doubling of fine motor units involved in aim and movement.

In theory, it wouldn't have been very hard to make a setup like this even 15 years ago. One would simply take two ball mice, disable the x-axis roller in one, and disable the y-axis roller in the other. Done. The biggest drawback I could find with this idea (other than its sheer alien-ness) is that one would not be able to use the keyboard for movement and weapon selection buttons. So you would have to map left, right, forward, back, jump, and weapon selection buttons all to the two mice. You'd need a lot of buttons. This could perhaps be alleviated with...


Foot pedals. It looks like there actually are gaming-oriented USB foot pedals now (like this one), though I can't attest to their quality. If the pedals were sensitive enough I can imagine it being possible that someone could play barefoot and use their big toes to trigger +jump, +left, or +right movements. Without actually trying this though, it's hard to say if the foot would have enough dexterity to do this well. Mapping +jump to a pedal would seem to me the most plausible idea.


Finger tip optical sensor. The point of this idea would be to almost completely get rid of the mass of the mouse and allow the player to control movements directly through a single fingertip pressed against the mousing surface. It seems to me like this sort of setup would offer the best of both worlds: more precision than a mouse for small, quick movements; and the ability to easily sweep the arm across a desk that is so useful for low sensitivities. I speculate that this solution could also be jury rig-able if one were to disassemble an optical mouse with a small enough sensor and find a way to fasten just the sensor to their fingertip(s).


Use a touch-sensitive surface. If a company could actually implement this well, it would work better than the finger tip optical idea above (due to no weight on the fingers, and no cord to worry about). It's pretty self-explanatory: something like a bamboo pad, or a track pad. But very large, with very high precision, and with very low latency. It seems like something like this doesn't exist yet. Maybe in the future the precision of a device like this could be increased by having the user wear something on their fingertip with a tiny, specific point for the trackpad to identify as the signal to track.


So these were a few loony ideas I've had. I might post more later. All in all, I'm a little disappointed that, 20 years later, we still haven't found a better input method than mouse+keyboard. All it seems we've done in that time is increase sample rate and move to optical sensors (of varying quality). And it's pretty incredible that in this day and age we still need to hack our systems to get 500 Hz mouse rates and deal with crappy inherent acceleration even in many "gaming" mice today.

When does the future start?

There's also a reason why it hasn't changed, for physical input devices, because they are as good as optimal.

If you use something else than Winblows you soon figure out that you can be alot more productive moving away from mouse usage and instead focusing on keyboard shortcuts and navigation.

I had access to foot pedals at work.
For computer it was just a regular keyboard. But actually it had only two buttons.
Unfortunately it was not possible to try them with Quake. But foot pedals can be definitely useful in game.

Sensors attached to the brain and you dont have to move your hands or feet at all...
Or what about eye-movements?

You gotta be netspider then, because anybode else would be looking at teammessages and that would be fail with eye-tracking

How about a toggle then. Eye tracking on/off. I imagine this is the only possible improvement.

ahaehuae... funny stuff

there was a portuguese player, killas, in 1997-1999 who strafed with his pedals. he had the most unpredictable strafe at the time. he was a very strong dueller.
Killas clan webpage still online: http://www.brunorua.com/sites/b/


some wild ideas here, keep them coming

There was a famous player in Australia named [ao]GreySkull who was right-handed but played with his mouse in his left hand because when he first learnt FPS games he would play on a friends computer who was left handed and everything was configured that way. After TEN years of playing with the wrong hand he actually made the switch and was eventually able to get to the skill level he was before.

At Twitch I've seen someone having only a small arm stump playing CS:GO, but doesnt seem handicapped there at all.
http://www.twitch.tv/therealhandi/profile


Also... I've seem somebody 'handling' the mouse only by foot, playiing RTS-es. He was actually good too. (accident, recovered somewhat but still kept playing with foot)
http://www.twitch.tv/pa_faijin/profile

Clearly the best input is the KFC Keyboard

http://www.dailylife.com.au/dl-people/dl-entertainment/stop-everything-kfc-keyboard-is-a-thing-20140918-3fzxd.html

Some really interesting responses so far! Let me add some more ideas to the mix.

Head-based input ideas. (This is where things get really weird).

As a potential avenue of input, the head has a lot going for it. It's the only part of the body with as much fine motor control as that of the hand. Underlying each of our faces are 43 small, delicate muscles. These muscles are mostly innervated by fine motor units - axons that innervate a relatively small amount of individual muscle fibers. A fine motor unit may innervate as few as 10 individual muscle fibers. Compare this to a motor unit in the quadriceps, which might innervate as many as one thousand muscle fibers. Since motor units contract in an all-or-none fashion, fewer cells per motor unit = more muscular precision. To drive home the point, here is a visual comparison of innervation density throughout the body.

There is another potential benefit to head-based input: reaction time. Studies consistently show that people's hands react to stimuli more quickly than do their feet. Axon path length likely plays a role in this phenomenon. While I couldn't find any scientific papers on face reaction time, it seems a reasonable hypothesis that muscles in the face may react faster than those in the hands due to an even shorter axon path length. And we QW'ers know that every millisecond matters!

How could future Quake players make use of this untapped resource of human dexterity? Here are a few ideas (again, generally ordered from "not very practical" to incredibly unpractical).

Bite buttons. This would be simple to jury-rig: some sort of button that is placed in the mouth such that the player presses it by biting down. It could perhaps be built into a mouth guard-like prosthetic. It would look weird as hell, but I can actually imagine a single bite button being perfectly effective for +jump - at least until TMJ set in. And hell, why not add in a couple more bite buttons for variety: an incisor trigger, and triggers on the left and right molars.

Tongue buttons. But first a little bit on the tongue.

The tongue must be the greatest untapped resource in computer input. Not only does it benefit from a short axon path length, but it also has extremely dense concentrations of sensory and motor neurons. The average tongue is divided into 8000 fine motor units - compare this to the 400 motor units in a typical biceps brachii. Speaking in evolutionary terms, this makes sense, as the tongue is a major player in speech, and also in simply making sure we swallow correctly.

The simplest way to start involving the tongue in input would be with simple buttons that can be worn on the lingual side of the teeth. Perhaps these could be built into our hypothetical bite button mouthpiece mentioned above. There could be many possible button configurations in this sort of setup. If the buttons were in a sort of D-Pad configuration, with the tongue being able to "slide" around on them as needed, one could even map +forward, +back, +moveleft, and +moveright to them. All the while mapping +jump to the bite button. The keyboard could be made obsolete (save for teambinds, pehaps), paving the way for the dual-mouse input idea in my previous post.

But of course, why stop our dreaming at buttons when more radical input methods can be dreamed up? How about a paralingual, shape-sensing wire mesh? This would be a snug, form fitting wire mesh that the player wears around their tongue. This mesh would be both pressure-sensitive, and able to sense deformations in its shape. This would effectively turn the tongue into an incredibly accurate analog stick in one's mouth. Additionally, "buttons" could be pressed by having the tongue apply pressure to some surface of the mouth - no physical buttons needed due to pressure sensitivity of the mesh.

Lots of actions could be mapped onto a mesh like this. Movement keys could, as with the button idea above, but with increased sensitivity and an analog component; one would simply flick their tongue in the desired direction of movement - no button presses necessary. One could even map their mouse movements to the tongue - though I'm skeptical of how effective this would be. Mapping the x-axis, in particular, might be troublesome . However, the tongue has enough room for up and down movement (or at least mine does!) that I wonder if one could effectively map the y-axis to the tongue, thus simplifying the hand to just x-axis movement.

One final idea is that one could map x- and y-axis movement to both the mouse and the tongue, except assign one a relatively high sensitivity and the other a relatively low sensitivity. This would allow a player to aim using two sensitivities. Not by switching between sensitivities - which is not very practical in QW anyways - but by using both sensitivities at the same time. A high sens player could use the lower sensitivity component to help add a bit of calibration to precision shots; a low sens player could use the high sens component in the opposite way.


Well, that's enough for now. More to come later.

I just love people like you, never stop man, never.

edit: post removed