I recently bought a new wireless mouse. So far, all the mice I’ve ever seen had either a red light at the bottom (IR im guessing) and I suppose that’s how it works. Or, even older, the little ball mice used to have. But this new one does not have either of them. It does have a similar hole like those with the red light, but no light at all. How do these work?
In: Technology
Well, the “red light” on an optical mouse is really just that – a red light emitted by an LED.
The mouse you have now is actually projecting infrared light, which is why you can’t see it, because humans can’t naturally perceive light in the infrared part of the spectrum.
If it’s a “laser” mouse, then it’s using infrared lasers to do the same thing that the LED “optical” mouse is doing (even though they’re both technically optical).
How they work is kind of like how a bat’s echo location. Except with light. It projects light, sometimes directly downward or sometimes through small mirrors/lenses, and then tracks the light particles as you move the mouse around. It translates that back into motion that the computer registers to show the appropriate motion on your screen. As you can imagine, it has to do this very, very quickly since you see it all happen in real time.
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