WarMouse revealed that its innovatively designed 18-button joystick mouse called the Meta will now ship with high-resolution laser sensor instead of optical sensor.
The revolutionary design is said to increase the speed by 30 percent compared to the traditional two-button mouse. Its patented design adorns 18 buttons, analog joystick, and 5600-cpi laser sensor. The Meta sporting in black with gray buttons was earlier known as the OpenOfficeMouse.
“We were frankly shocked by the overwhelming response to our original announcement of the mouse,” said Theodore Beale, Lead Designer at WarMouse. “We sent out three emails and ended up getting three million hits on our website that weekend; no one seemed to believe that an 18-button mouse with a joystick could be anything but a joke. But it’s real, it’s brutal, and it’s going to fundamentally change what people expect of their input devices. There are some who are of the opinion that the Meta is insane, but we believe there are many gamers and power users who want to be able to do more than stroke their mouse with two fingers.”
The Meta claims to be the first computer mice to come integrated with an analog joystick alongside the first allowing joystick as a digital keyboard interface. With its three digital joystick modes, users can assign up to sixteen different keys or macros to the joystick. Other functionalities are 18 programmable mouse buttons with double-click functionality, high-resolution laser sensor with adjustable resolution from 100 to 5,600 DPI/CPI, analog Xbox 360-style joystick, clickable scroll wheel and 512k of flash memory.
Chris Park, the lead designer of the popular independent strategy game AI War: Fleet Command, remarked: “I’ve been using a 5-button mouse for many years now, and there was once a time when I thought I’d never need more than two buttons — I shudder at the thought, now. So I’m interested to see how the Meta handles in practice when I actually get my hands on one. The thing that most interests me is the analog stick on the side of it. For AI War, I imagine that this would make panning much simpler, and it could be really handy for panning in other applications, as well. It is a feature that seems to fit tidily on the side of the mouse and which I could see eventually becoming as indispensable as the fourth and fifth buttons on my current mouse.”
The Meta also offers optional audio notification of mode switching and 25 default modes for renowned games and applications such as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, Microsoft Word, 3D Studio Max, Adobe Photoshop, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and more.
The WarMouse Meta is compliant with Windows, Linux, and Macintosh operating systems. It is expected to retail for $74.99 during the Q1 of 2010.
