14 DAY TRIAL // Optical mice are all well and good, but what if you could add some extra functionality to them? What if you could adapt the optical sensor to do more than recognize when you move the mouse against the surface?
Those are the questions that Hong Kong-based company Design to Innovation (DTOI) decided to answer.
Admittedly, it is not the first company to release a mouse with integrated scanning capabilities. However, it is the first to launch a model that is also wireless.
Previously, it was impossible to cram the scanning tech along with the battery and Wi-Fi chip without having to sacrifice the portability of wireless mice.
The Zcan Wireless doesn't have this problem. Indeed, it uses 2.4 GHz wireless frequency and gets energy from a rechargeable lithium battery.
The scanner uses SLAM Scan software (developed by Swiss company Dacuda for portable wireless scanners), meaning you can process text and images in real time. All you have to do is be connected via Wi-Fi to a host PC and swipe the mouse over a document or image. It should appear immediately on the monitor.
Windows 7/8 and Mac OS X 10.6 operating systems or higher are supported, along with iOS (third-gen iPad and second-gen iPad Mini). iPhone 5/5S support should come by the end of the year. Unfortunately, Android support was not mentioned, at least for now.
Images and text scanned are rendered in 400 dpi resolution and can be saved in JPEG, TIFF, PNG, or BMP image formats, or as Excel, Word, PDF, and TXT doc files. 199 languages can be detected (and spoken aloud) through Optical Character Recognition (OCR), though you need to be linked to Google Translate for it.
To get a DTOI Zcan Wireless scanner mouse, you need to pledge $79 / €59 through the Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign or wait until October when retail availability is scheduled (assuming the $30,000 / €22,400 goal is reached). Be advised, however, that retail prices are always higher than early pledges.
Below we've included the demo video of the device. As you can see, it is a very, very small mouse, smaller than most standard mobile mice actually. As far as sales pitches go, it's actually not that bad. Let's just hope that there will, eventually, be support for Android smartphones and tablets, otherwise DTOI will miss out on a truly large potential customer base. Not that it would be a first time a gadget only supported PC and Apple products, but still.
