Lil bro you just got gibbed by a dude massaging a ball in a half pipe like some Sisyphussian metaphor of the human condition, go back to playing against bots
wow looked this up, and it’s not really a trackball, it’s more of a huge Lenovo trackpoint/nipple/joystick thing originally developed for aerospace applications
what was up with trackball users? who isn't immediately deterred by its unstable equilibrium other than those with serious wrist or arm mobility issues?
Kensington Expert Trackball is pretty standard issue for professional DAW and film editing users. Works great for me! You won’t really know if it’s helpful for you unless you give it a shot yourself 👋
"Unstable equilibrium"? What does that even mean? Trackballs save my wrist, and mean I don't need to dedicate a field on my desk for its use. Using my laptop in all kinds of crowded lab environments is basically possible with a trackball.
"unstable equilibrium" is used normally here: tiny perturbations cause it to slip away from a desired target, making precise movement difficult rather than settling to a local minimum. a mouse would be more neutral equilibrium
The only time I've had that problem is in FPSes, and the L-Trac can change DPI on the fly to address it. For everything else, precision is far easier with a trackball than a mouse: take your finger off the ball and the mouse pointer's not going to move.
Mice have you moving the pointing hardware all over your desk and back. It's even worse with a multi monitor set-up.
A trackball keeps everything right at your fingertips, and no further away than that.
It's much better for your wrist and forearm.
Yeah, they nailed the _look_ of a magnetically suspended sphere maybe a little too well. Gotta imagine a nontrivial number of extremely disappointed customers just based on that alone.
My college (WPI) had an entire lab full of those in the mid-90s. I don't think I ever say any of them actually being used, though. It would have been awesome to play Descent (1995) with one of those!
This is not a trackball or a mouse cursor controller. It's a 3D mouse used 3D apps, CAD, etc. They are still very much made and in use today.
3dconnexion.com/us/spacemouse/
My roommate in college dropped out of school to be a spokesperson for Spaceball based off his online Descent skills.
You know that thing had a button that would instantly flip the ship?
