Mouse:

A mouse is small hand-held box utilized to position the screen cursor. Rollers or wheels on the bottom of the mouse may be utilized to record the amount and direction of movement. An optical sensor can also be utilized to detect the mouse motion. For utilizing it, the mouse is moved over a special mouse pad that has a grid of horizontal and vertical lines. Movements across the lines in the grid are detected by the optical sensor.

Since a mouse may be picked up and put down at another position without change in cursor movement, it is utilized for making relative changes in the position of the screen cursor. For signaling the execution of some operations, different kinds of buttons are included on the top of the mouse. Now, most general-purpose graphics systems include a mouse and a keyboard as the major input devices.

Additional devices may be included in the basic mouse design to enhance the number of allowable input parameters. The Z mouse involved three buttons, one thumbwheel on the side, one trackball on the top, & one standard mouse ball underneath. This design gives six degrees of freedom to choose rotations, spatial positions, and other parameters. With the Z mouse, we may pick up an object, rotate it, and move this in any direction, or we may navigate our viewing position and orientation through three-dimensional scene. Applications of Z mouse involved virtual reality, CAD & animation.