This was on slashdot a long time ago:
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ping/peep/
I think the n800's webcam would substitute nicely for the optical mouse used in one of the setups. It also appears that the clie used has a camera, but glancing over the paper it did not appear to be used as a tracking device.

Is any work being done on this? I know some people have the right idea
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...6566#post26566

I found https://garage.maemo.org/projects/motiondetector/ but this does not appear to do any scrolling or panning.

I can see great potential if this comes to fruition.

Since the web cam is rotatable, it can function as a jog dial and we can scroll simply by rotating it.

While this may seem like over kill, it'll be a nifty goldberg jog dial.

Why rotate the camera? Write a proggie that can follow a fingertip, so all you have to do is wave your finger over the camera to make the screen go where you want. Sort of a virtual scrollpad.

Simple, huh?

Seems like no one is gettin excited about this..

Maybe it's not that simple after all...

re: this, bear in mind that just getting the video stream burns quite a bit of resources. Real-time image analysis is A) voodoo and B) processor-expensive

That said, aiming it at a presentation and looking for a laser pointer dot (rather cheap, processor-wise) as a control signal? Could be nifty.

Oh, emulating an optical mouse is rather tricky, given that the sample rates of those dramatically exceed (3x-100x) that of the N800's camera.

I wasn't thinking about full mouse emulation, rather than simple scrolling, a bit like what a center mouse wheel does.

That's what I mean by emulating an optical mouse.

An optical mouse takes a rapidfire series of pictures and compares sets of them to determine which way you moved it (this is why fast movements on patterned surfaces can throw it off something fierce.)

Your average optical mouse samples at 60hz and 400dpi; more advanced mice (laser mice, generally) sample at 125hz and 800dpi; gaming mice sample at 500hz and 1600dpi; my mouse samples at 1000hz and 2000dpi

Optical mice also take pictures at a constant height, etc, etc.

This isn't -impossible- to duplicate, but it is quite hard. I intend to poke at it.

I'm working with OpenCV right now --- relatively hard to discover, and therefore linked here:

http://opencvlibrary.sourceforge.net/

Real-time open-source computer vision. Seems like what we want.