Today, 3Dconnexion announce a new product. They’re not pucking around with another SpaceMouse, though, oh no. Today, they announce the CadMouse, which is less like a 3D Mouse, and more like your regular mouse, but with smart scroll, command access and a special spot for that middle nubbin to send cad-jabs of pleasure to your central button-pressing unit. Let’s have a look, but first questions first. Why even develop a plain-old mouse??
Antonio Pascucci, VP of products at 3Dconnexion says, “We developed the 3Dconnexion CadMouse because CAD users asked us to. We took the time to understand what they needed before developing a combination of smart hardware and software features.”
You likely have a mouse with a few more buttons than usual, maybe some thumb buttons or programmable keys. It’s a mouse button for all occasions: surfing, emailing, modeling, mincrafting, etc., but 3Dconnexion is convinced this is a CAD industry game changer, calling it “The World’s First Mouse for CAD Professionals” and one that works complimentery to the 3D Mouse products you use with your other hand. One provides the precision motion, one provides the precision clicks. Both are set up through the same 3Dconnexion’s 3DxWare software.
“The icing on the cake is that CadMouse enables a new level of Two-Handed Power for our current customers,” Antonio continues to explain. “In other words, using a CadMouse together with a 3Dconnexion 3D mouse like the SpaceMouse Pro or SpaceNavigator makes it possible to interact with digital content in a way that wasn’t possible before.”
Yes, hang your heads in shame mouse manufacturers. You got rid of that middle mouse button, oh so long ago, replacing it with a scroll wheel/button, not thinking we could manage more with our eye/hand coordination hewn over decades of sketching-click-click-click-extruding. If you’re skeptical of what strange a wonderful magic a wee mouse could hold, here’s a breakdown of the features.
- Dedicated, Full-Size Middle Mouse Button — Destroys the discomfort of clicking the scroll wheel thousands of times per day.
- QuickZoom – Zoom in and out of your models or drawings with a single click of a thumb button.
- Smart Scroll Wheel – Application specific scroll wheel with precise “click-to-click” zooming in CAD applications or speedy scrolling in browsers and documents.
- Advanced Laser Sensor— With 8200dpi and a poll rate of up to 1000Hz (responsiveness of 1 millisecond) it’s extremely precise.
- Gesture / Radial Menu Button – The CadMouse’s gesture button opens a context sensitive on-screen radial menu. Move the cursor left, right, up or down to activate the command.
- Optimally Shaped PTFE feet – CadMouse has optimally shaped feet made from PTFE, a material with one of the lowest coefficients of friction against any solid.
3Dconnexion hasn’t published videos of the CadMouse on their Youtube channel yet, but you can see a breakdown of each feature on the CadMouse webpage. The retail price of the CadMouse is set at US $99 and will be available for purchase near the end of February through approved reseller and the 3Dconnexion store.
Is this the mouse you’ve been waiting for?
