Ailsa Petrie: Week 3 Mouse

Ghosted

Bird's Eye

Close-up

For my mouse I wanted to create a product that was different from most typical computer scrolling objects. I also wanted to make my product highly ergonomic. I decided to make a wrist rest and then two finger pads suspended by wire that when very lightly touched can be used as right and left click buttons. These finger pads have indents for the fingers to rest and are ergonomically placed at the average distance from a humans wrist. This makes for an ultra comfortable 'mouse' experience. I also added a scroll tool to the left hand wire for the thumb to scroll as I find that using a finger to scroll is much less natural that the right left movement of a thumb when placed in this comfortable position.

In order to make my ErgoMaus I made a sphere and then used control points to alter the shape to that of the palm when resting on a table. I then made a cube bisecting the bottom of the sphere and did a Boolean difference. In order to make the edge of my product less at the bottom I drew a circle underneath the object and scaled it to be a bit smaller than the original circle. I then used the BlendSrf command to connect the bottom of the mouse and this circle in a more organic way. I used a pipe to make the poles connecting to the finger pads and I made the finger pads in the same way I made the base of the mouse, by altering the spheres control points. Lastly I made the scrolling tool by using CurveBoolean with a circle and smaller circles rotated around the main circle with equal difference. I Extruded this shape to make the scroll.

I wanted my ErgoMaus to be sleek so I used shiny dark colors for the base and finger pads. The finger pads are actually made of carbon fiber so that they are very light and hardly need to be pressed in order to make adjustments on the computer. I wanted the poles connecting to these pads to be made of aluminum so that they are also light. The scroll is bright red to give the product a pop of color.