It's very safe because every living human being is a source of Infrared radiation. Any one of our fingers is under constant Infrared radiation from other fingers. On the other hand, the radiation from the Touchless Mouse is only working at a short distance and short pulsed, the intensity of the radiation is less than 1/10 of that from a remote control, and is weaker than that from your own body's radiation field.

We did intensive investigations when we were developing the Starfish Pointer that has 24 directions. It turns out that no matter how you move the cursor with a mouse, the cursor moves in small segments in X and Y directions because the pixels in screen are laid out in a matrix form. So all the movement of the cursor can be broken down into 3 direction types: on X-axis, on Y-axis, and on X-Y 45 degree slopes. The 8 directions are the elements of the directional movement of a cursor. Since the smallest step that our Touchless Mouse can move a cursor is just one pixel, you can trace any curves or paths along which a regular mouse can move the cursor with our Touchless Mouse.

It is found that in most graphics software, only the start point and end point are used to define a shape or a curve. Our Touchless Mouse is better at moving the cursor to specific points than a regular mouse. In some drawing software, when you want to draw arbitrary fluid curves, it is still possible to use the inner ring of our Touchless Mouse to make a "fluid" path.

A Touchless Mouse is more efficient than a regular mouse in the sense that when you move a cursor with a touchless mouse, the cursor can move in the shortest path towards the destination point without wasting any motion. When using a regular mouse, the cursor cannot go in straight lines but winding around before reaching the neighborhood of the destination point. Since the pixels are distributed in rectangular arrays on a monitor, moving in straight line is more efficient than a wavy path.

The performance of the Touchless Mouse, meaning the speed of getting things done, varies widely among users with different level of experience. For beginners, slower inner rings are often used to position the cursor at a desired location. Users who can go with the fast speed of the outer ring, often with another finger to control the center stop entry, can achieve a high performance only limited by the eye sight of monitoring the cursor movement.

Considering the realistic fact that most regular mouse has a limited space on the desktop to move, also due to the limited length of the arm, it often takes multiple motions of picking up, pushing/pulling the mouse back and forth to complete a desired movement of the cursor. Also considering the fact that when the finger, wrist, or arm are hurting, it's reluctant for the user to grip and move the mouse, then the Touchless Mouse has a much better performance for work in the long run.

For beginners who never used mouse before, the Touchless Mouse is actually easier to learn and use than a regular mouse because when using mouse, it's difficult to track the path of the cursor. But for those who have years of experience using mouse with a strong habit of moving the cursor with the movement of hand, it takes a few minutes to overcome the habit of using a moving finger to move the mouse.

Another issue is to raise the finger and stop the cursor right on target. Every user can use the slowest speed with no problem, but it's too slow. It takes some time to learn to move at a fast speed. And the learning time varies from a few minutes to several days.

It doesn't take a learning curve to do touchless clicking. Pay attention to how far your finger is above the surface to start triggering the light, then double clicking can be done by a minimal waving of the finger.

It takes 20-30 seconds to get to know how each element functions and become productive. Some smart people become proficient in 15 minutes.

However, each person's hand and learning ability is different. Once you've found how to comfortablly position the Touchless Mouse and your hand, you'll become efficient very fast.

A major harmful effect of regular mouse and touch pad is the too much movement of the hand. For a typical computer worker, a day's use of the mouse may need to move the hand for many miles, very harmful to the wrist and shoulder. It's also a cause of carpal tunnel syndrom.

At the beginning we did put in the feature to use the motion of the finger to move the cursor to follow people's habbit. But when we found that moving the cursor with hand at still can also achieve a comparable performance and without the harmful effet, we disabled that feature.

For new users it is similar to using a keyboard that a look at the panel from time to time is needed. However, it doesn't take long, much shorter than learning a keyboard, to become a natural action without the need to see the panel.

On the other hand, infrequently moving your head up and down slightly is a good thing to your neck and eye to break from the static posture of staring at the screen all the time.

What is needed is a small reflective surface that can reflect enough Infrared light to trigger the sensors. An ordinary ball-point pen will work with its bigger head that is hard, smooth, and reflective. A metal head is the best. Black plastic heads don't work. Soft, dummy heads don't work either. Some pencil heads work sometimes.

LightIO's Infrared pen and LED pen both work.

Yes, if you try and you'll see that it is functional when your finger is within 0-5mm from the holes. Sometimes place your finger or pen head on the hole is convenient, but to avoid the clicking forces completely, it's recommended to rest the hand beside the module and wave slightly to operate it.