October 8, 2008 • 19 mins
Check out this podcast from HowStuffWorks to learn more about high-end computer peripherals, such as customizable keyboards and specialized video game consoles.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi there,
welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poette. I'm
an editor here at how Stuff Works, and with me
I have writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, So today we
(00:24):
were going to talk about some peripherals for your computer
add ons, you know, extra things, mice, keyboards, not but
but not not the kind of you and I use,
right because we're poor. Yeah, yeah, no, we're talking well,
in some cases we're talking about extravagantly expensive peripherals, in
other cases that they're not extravagantly expensive, but they are.
(00:46):
It's definitely an investment. And if you are not the
kind of person who would use these sort of things
on a regular basis, it would definitely be an extravagance. True.
And you you even mentioned that you have a few
that aren't even computer related, right, Yes, that's true. Well,
we'll get into those. I guess okay, I thought, I thought.
I started off with the Granddaddy, the one that made
the news um when it was on a lot of
(01:08):
the electronics and gadgets blogs about a year ago, a
year and a half. Yeah, you might have heard of it. Um,
this energy keyboard, Yes, about such the heck you say,
Oh my gosh, you are right. Um, yes, I did
write an article on this energy keyboard. Uh. Those guys
are are pretty cool guys. They did not send me one.
(01:30):
But well, I mean, when you're talking about a twenty
eight thousand dollar keyboard, yeah, they aren't really eager on
sending out test copies even like, oh sure I'll send
it back. No. Um, but let's let's clear up a
few things first before we get too involved in this.
Uh like what exactly? Yeah, with these blogs, when they
(01:53):
say a twenty dollar keyboard, you know, you just sit
there and think, who the heck is gonna pay twenty
eight grand for a keyboard? Well, the the analogy I
used in the article, which I think is fairly apt,
is to call you know, if you call this energy
just a keyboard, it's like calling a Bentley two dollar radio,
because the Bentley does have a radio in it, right, Um,
(02:17):
but you're not paying two dollars for the radio. You're
paying two hut dollars for the Bentley. Um, so you
can drive the keyboard kind of No, No, not at all. No,
you're taking the analogy too far. Let's step back a bit.
The key it's not just a keyboard. It's really a
media and audio video production center, all in one little
(02:41):
compact package. And I say little because if you've ever
been in an audio video studio, like one of the
really big professional ones, they're huge, and you've you've seen them,
right of course. Yeah, you're in your career as a
rock musician. God, you've seen these all the time, right
of course. Okay, so um, good old Filet and his drums. Um.
(03:04):
So anyway, and we're not joking, he really and anyway,
let's move on. So these these studios are rather large.
They have these big consoles that are all specialized. Well,
the Synergy keyboard. The one of the purposes for this
is to kind of replace a lot of that equipment,
put it all in a very compact package. And the
way it works is this, every single key on that
(03:24):
keyboard is really a tiny computer monitor, So the keys
can display different images based upon what sort of task
you're doing. If you're just typing regular letter or an
email or whatever, it could be a quarty keyboard and
everything just looks the way a normal keyboard would. If
you go into video editing mode, you'll suddenly have the
keys will just switch, so keys that you don't need
(03:46):
they'll disappear, and a new key will appear in its place.
Because the each key is a little monitor, and so
you might have things like play and rewind and cut
and paste and all that kind of stuff, the common
things you would use. And it has a jog we deal,
it has its own little LCD screen. So um, it's actually,
like I said, a full audio visual editing package in
(04:09):
keyboard format. So let's not you know. That's that's probably
why most people you know maybe had read that far.
They're just like, wow, how can a keyboard cost that much? Well,
when you're talking about replacing an entire studio, which could
cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's really, comparatively speaking,
not that expensive. I'm still not gonna be buying one
(04:29):
anytime soon. I would love to see one in action. Um.
I keep hoping that I'll I'll run into one at
a convention or something, just so I can see it
work in person, But um, yeah, I don't think I'll
be cracking the bank open to to buy one. When
I could buy a car, not a Bentley, but a
car for that same amount. Well, it seems like we've
come a long way from the video toaster days. You
(04:52):
have that built into the keyboard itself, right, But we
are actually going to talk about another uh computer keyboard
that allows you to display different things keys too. Yeah,
the I believe you're referring to the Optimus Maximus, Yes, yes,
which is a keyboard that dresses and gladiator clothes and
has a sword and also is more than meets the eye.
(05:14):
We'll just go ahead across genre that. But it does
have O. L E. D S or oh lads built
into this screen and you can actually program the different keys,
like if you wanted one to be the Firefox key,
you can make it, you know, put the little Firefox
logo in there and it will show up on the
key because it's got a little video screen built into
(05:36):
it with little led Shi kind of cool. You could
actually put in animated gifts if you wanted to, so
you can have a little a little yeah, like Sparkle
or twirl or whatever. Um. And this was a big
hit for a while, especially when we kept waiting and
waiting and yeah, this was one of those that was
delayed for a really long time. And and there's a
(05:57):
range of these. That's true, that's true. They a little
le yeah, and and you can choose how many keys
actually have this feature. So if you didn't want to
pay the full one, the the knacked out one, if
you will, as all of its keys uh in O
L O L E de form that one's about um.
But you could get ones the where you're just like, okay,
(06:19):
well just these four keys have the O L E
D S or just the just the function keys um,
and they were less expensive. They're still pretty pretty hefty
price for a keyboard, but if you wanted to uh
and and that, you could even have it where you
could switch out keys eventually. So let's say that you know,
you bought the keyboard, you got it with the ten
(06:39):
function keys, and later on you want to upgrade, you
could do that. UM. Essentially you be paying the balance
of whatever it was to get to the full keyboard.
But but it gave you that option. So people who
just wanted to try it out and see if that's
what they wanted, and they only wanted to drop, say
nine hundred dollars, could do that. Again, I don't think
(07:02):
I'll be buying this keyboard anytime soon. Yeah, and I
certainly wouldn't want to eat my lunch at my desk
if I had one of these keyboards. Right, a little expensive.
And there are other keyboards we could talk about their
their The gaming community has quite a few because a
lot of people have the specialized needs, you know, they
want to be able to fire and have a special control.
(07:24):
They want to frag you in in a fraction of
the second that they could with their old keyboards. Right, yeah, yeah,
I've met you. You you ten year olds out there
who can snipe me from a mile away, and one
day you're going to be old and slow like I am.
But anyway, the two keyboards I was going to talk about,
just very briefly, there's the the Microsoft Sidewinder X six
(07:47):
gaming keyboard and then the Steel Series seven G keyboard. Um,
these are both gaming keyboards. They both can store macros
so that you can program a series of commands and
and assign it to a single key and that way,
you know, you can display your leaked skills by pressing
one button or another instead of like a series of them. Um.
(08:09):
The Sidewinders actually kind of interesting from an aesthetic point
of view, it's back lit with red light. It's red
light glues from around your keys and uh, the sidewinders
eighty bucks. The Steel series is a hundred and fifties.
So we're talking about a much bigger step down in
price from our others. But then again, we're talking about
(08:29):
gaining here or not uh not not some special productions, right,
not a not a big production kind of keyboard. Um,
so yeah, that that pretty much covers my my area
of the keyboards. Did you have anything else on those?
Not on keyboards? On keyboards? Why do you want to
move on to next? Well, I was going to talk
about other kinds of peripherals. You know a lot of
(08:50):
a lot of peripherals that you'll find for your computer
other than the standard mouse keyboard type stuff. Um, a
lot of the high end and and pricing stuff is
going to be for gaming now. Um, it's really funny
when I mentioned the video toaster a few minutes ago.
I'm longtime listeners will probably remember that every once in a
(09:10):
a while, throw in the Amiga because that was my
first computer, and people used to ridicule the Amiga is
a gaming machine, used to well, the thing was It
was way before a lot of the other machines had
full color and had stereo sound, and a lot of
people would build games for it, which were at that
time really high end. UM. But of course those same
(09:33):
people now are buying the five thousand dollar PCs with
the tricked out water cooled UH processors and the high
end graphics cards and the you know steering wheels with
force uh force feedback, and the driving seats where you
sit down in there, and the exactly with all the
pedals and stuff, and those those you know, can cost
(09:55):
thousands of dollars, you know, just as as add ons.
I mean, this is not the kind of thing that
people are buying in in bulk. But you know, oh yeah,
I'll just run down and pick one of those up
one WARLD. I'm just gonna go grab another one. But
there are other other peripherals too, I mean gaming consoles there.
I thought of a couple that, you know, sort of
(10:18):
off the beaten track, because I figured you were going
to go for the computer e stuff and I was
thinking about, well, I mean, gaming consoles are a form
of computers, UM. And I remember a few years ago
there was a game for Xbox, the first Xbox called
Steel Battalion. It was actually highly rated. I went and
and you know, looked up a little information about how
it had been received. But the big news before it
(10:39):
came out, I remember, was that it came out with
this huge console of tan. It's a tank game. Um,
I think where a Mecca game. I was on the
impression of his tank on me. You can tell I
don't own an Xbox anyway. Um, but it came out
with this this uh big board of controls where you
could use all sorts of different levers and buttons to
(11:00):
to uh you know, arm your weapons and move the
thing around. And it actually had more than forty buttons
with two joysticks and three foot pedals, which is you know,
you think about an Xbox game or any console game,
really they're around fifty bucks, right, fifty Well that pushed
the price of this game up to two because it
(11:22):
came with this specialized console, which was one of the
most expensive games out there. Yeah, and and really it's
it's expensive for now. Well yeah, but you see them
a little more often now because you have games like
rock Band, where you were to buy the full rock
Band set that's in the that's around that range. It's
funny you should mention rock band, is it? Yes? And
uh and also the drummer thing going into this, you
(11:44):
can see why I'm I'm kind of keen on this thing.
Um ion Who's booth? I visited at c E S,
but I didn't see actually this particular peripheral. UM. They've
come out with a new uh drum set for a
rock band called the drum Rocker. And it's they actually
worked with the electronics manufacturer Elasis. They make keyboards and
(12:06):
electronic percussion and all kinds of uh, you know, electronic instruments. Um.
And this has four drum pads with a kick drum
and two symbols, and it's it's actually made of aluminum
rather than the plastic that you would find in the
typical rock band kits. So I mean it's it's more robust.
People are gonna yeah, people are really gonna hey, yeah,
(12:26):
thank you for doing that. So I didn't have to
say rock out wait I already did. Um Anyway, Okay,
this this is actually a pretty pricey set too. But
not only do you work over the additional money for
for this set, you also can buy an additional symbol
for fifty dollars, or the drum throne, which is what
(12:47):
we uh call the seat the drummer sits on, and
I still don't know why. Yeah, it's a stool, but
we call it the throne. And then you can, if
you really want, you can actually buy a drum brain,
which is essentially the computer that goes along with the
electronic drum set, the Elasis d M five drum brain. Uh.
You can add that for an additional three sixty so
(13:09):
you don't have to be playing rock band with it.
You can actually use them for regular electronic drums, so
that here, you know, you can just hear the the
chitching sound every time you add on something else too, right,
But you know, if you're really into rock band, yeah,
or if you really really are trying to start up
that flock of Seagulls cover band, or you need those
electronic drum sounds. I told you not to mention the
(13:31):
new wave roots come out, all right, Okay, I see
your console stuff, and I'm gonna I'm gonna switch back
over to computers. I'm gonna talk about computer mice just
really briefly. You want to talk talk about a little
bit about the Yeah, yeah, so you know your standard
computer mouse costs maybe between fifteen twenty bucks something like
that if you want to wireless one and maybe thirty plus.
(13:55):
There's some there's some more expensive ones out there. There's
the Space Navigator mouse, which is that really a three
D mouse um where it looks almost like a paddle
like on the old Attori you know what I'm talking about,
kind of the same thing. You can twist it to
make it go left or right, and you can tilt
it to make it zoom in or zoom out. It's
useful for things like if you're in a CAD program,
(14:17):
UM architecture program, or Google Earth, you can use zoom
in and out and and reorient yourself. UM. Not necessarily
useful for other applications, but it's pretty cool. UM. Then
there are other things like there's the novent Falcon haptic mouse,
which it looks really neat. It's got a base unit
that has some articulated arms that reach out and all
(14:41):
attached to a small UH sphere, and you hold the
sphere and you your motions. You you move the sphere
in three dimensions, so you can move it in and out.
You can move up and down, left, right, and you
can in any direction you want, and the articulated arms
allow you to do that, and your actions are are
transferred into whatever computer realm you're exploring of that time,
(15:03):
and there's even haptic feedback there so we can push
it back against you for certain games and things. Um,
that's pretty cool too. I actually saw one of those
at c E S. I didn't get a chance to
play with it. There was actually a pretty big crowd
around that. But those those look pretty neat too. Uh.
But I was really going to go into the grand
(15:23):
daddy of expensive mouse uh systems here. Um, and it's
not expensive because of its tech specs. Uh. It is
the pet says now computer mouse. It is twenty four
thousand dollars for a mouse for a grand less than
(15:44):
this energy and yet all it does is click And
it's just a regular mouse, except that's made out of
eighteen carrot white gold and has fifty nine diamonds in it,
like like on the on the surface of the mouse.
And you can have it in either a scattered or
flower design. I'm hoping that this is a laser not
(16:07):
at all, so you still have to pull the ball
out and clean. Yeah, you know, but it's it's it's
made from poor people. No, I mean no, it's but
it's it's alright, you go breaking news. Though, before you
can only get in the scatter diamond or the flower
diamond pattern. Now you can use your you can choose
your own pattern and even use your initials if you like.
(16:30):
So if you were holding back because you're like, well
I don't really like the scatter of the flower, and
then now you can actually drop that twenty four grand.
Um it's mainly sold out of the UK. Yeah, I
thought that would be a nice little addition. And then
I was gonna talk also really quickly about monitors. Yeah.
When I was looking for monitors to see like what
would be a really cool, like big high end peripheral,
(16:54):
I found the enlightened i T seven to zero two
seventy two inch touch screen. That's huge obviously. Um, it's
got two different models. There's a three thousand dollar model
which chooses a light pen that has an infrared tip
to it. There's an infrared camera that's the screen is
(17:15):
backlit obviously, so there's an infrared camera on the back
right next to the light source that can detect where
the light pin is. Then there's a four thousand dollar
model that uses cameras mounted on the top of the
screen to triangulate positions. You can you can use your
finger on that one, so you would put your finger
against the screen and the cameras detect where your finger is.
There's no actual touch screen technology on the screen itself.
(17:38):
It's all done through visual like optics. So you move
your finger around and it follows your finger and that's
how you can change the input. So yeah, if you
have three or four grand to drop, you can get
a nice, nice large screen. I don't think our cubicles
would even allow us seventy two inch screen in them,
would they? Probably not? Note to self get bigger cubicle. Excellent.
(18:00):
I was wondering if this is the kind of thing
that we would need if we were going to move
to the next step of the Minority Report era. You know,
you start drawing in the air and until you get
the holographic displays. Yeah, exactly. Boy, those would be cool,
Yeah they would. I bet they're expensive, probably, I guess
that would counts a high end peripheral I'm sure, and
the technology you need to run away from the and
(18:24):
I think we're getting off track here, maybe here, maybe
maybe we can wrap this up. Okay, you think, all right, Well,
there are plenty of other high end peripherles out there.
We didn't even cover sound systems or or other input
systems like Waycom tablets, which are pretty darn cool too,
although most of those are pretty affordable. Yeah. There, I
was looking at a two thou one. Wow. Yeah no,
(18:44):
but it was really nice. Um. So you can read
all about these kinds of systems on how stuff works
dot com right now. We cover everything from keyboards to
monitors everything in between. So check out the website learn
a little bit more about this. Figure out. You're gonna
drop all that massive cash you got sitting around, and
we will talk to you again really soon for more
(19:08):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi there,
welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poette. I'm
an editor here at how Stuff Works, and with me
I have writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, So today we
(00:24):
were going to talk about some peripherals for your computer
add ons, you know, extra things, mice, keyboards, not but
but not not the kind of you and I use,
right because we're poor. Yeah, yeah, no, we're talking well,
in some cases we're talking about extravagantly expensive peripherals, in
other cases that they're not extravagantly expensive, but they are.
(00:46):
It's definitely an investment. And if you are not the
kind of person who would use these sort of things
on a regular basis, it would definitely be an extravagance. True.
And you you even mentioned that you have a few
that aren't even computer related, right, Yes, that's true. Well,
we'll get into those. I guess okay, I thought, I thought.
I started off with the Granddaddy, the one that made
the news um when it was on a lot of
(01:08):
the electronics and gadgets blogs about a year ago, a
year and a half. Yeah, you might have heard of it. Um,
this energy keyboard, Yes, about such the heck you say,
Oh my gosh, you are right. Um, yes, I did
write an article on this energy keyboard. Uh. Those guys
are are pretty cool guys. They did not send me one.
(01:30):
But well, I mean, when you're talking about a twenty
eight thousand dollar keyboard, yeah, they aren't really eager on
sending out test copies even like, oh sure I'll send
it back. No. Um, but let's let's clear up a
few things first before we get too involved in this.
Uh like what exactly? Yeah, with these blogs, when they
(01:53):
say a twenty dollar keyboard, you know, you just sit
there and think, who the heck is gonna pay twenty
eight grand for a keyboard? Well, the the analogy I
used in the article, which I think is fairly apt,
is to call you know, if you call this energy
just a keyboard, it's like calling a Bentley two dollar radio,
because the Bentley does have a radio in it, right, Um,
(02:17):
but you're not paying two dollars for the radio. You're
paying two hut dollars for the Bentley. Um, so you
can drive the keyboard kind of No, No, not at all. No,
you're taking the analogy too far. Let's step back a bit.
The key it's not just a keyboard. It's really a
media and audio video production center, all in one little
(02:41):
compact package. And I say little because if you've ever
been in an audio video studio, like one of the
really big professional ones, they're huge, and you've you've seen them,
right of course. Yeah, you're in your career as a
rock musician. God, you've seen these all the time, right
of course. Okay, so um, good old Filet and his drums. Um.
(03:04):
So anyway, and we're not joking, he really and anyway,
let's move on. So these these studios are rather large.
They have these big consoles that are all specialized. Well,
the Synergy keyboard. The one of the purposes for this
is to kind of replace a lot of that equipment,
put it all in a very compact package. And the
way it works is this, every single key on that
(03:24):
keyboard is really a tiny computer monitor, So the keys
can display different images based upon what sort of task
you're doing. If you're just typing regular letter or an
email or whatever, it could be a quarty keyboard and
everything just looks the way a normal keyboard would. If
you go into video editing mode, you'll suddenly have the
keys will just switch, so keys that you don't need
(03:46):
they'll disappear, and a new key will appear in its place.
Because the each key is a little monitor, and so
you might have things like play and rewind and cut
and paste and all that kind of stuff, the common
things you would use. And it has a jog we deal,
it has its own little LCD screen. So um, it's actually,
like I said, a full audio visual editing package in
(04:09):
keyboard format. So let's not you know. That's that's probably
why most people you know maybe had read that far.
They're just like, wow, how can a keyboard cost that much? Well,
when you're talking about replacing an entire studio, which could
cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's really, comparatively speaking,
not that expensive. I'm still not gonna be buying one
(04:29):
anytime soon. I would love to see one in action. Um.
I keep hoping that I'll I'll run into one at
a convention or something, just so I can see it
work in person, But um, yeah, I don't think I'll
be cracking the bank open to to buy one. When
I could buy a car, not a Bentley, but a
car for that same amount. Well, it seems like we've
come a long way from the video toaster days. You
(04:52):
have that built into the keyboard itself, right, But we
are actually going to talk about another uh computer keyboard
that allows you to display different things keys too. Yeah,
the I believe you're referring to the Optimus Maximus, Yes, yes,
which is a keyboard that dresses and gladiator clothes and
has a sword and also is more than meets the eye.
(05:14):
We'll just go ahead across genre that. But it does
have O. L E. D S or oh lads built
into this screen and you can actually program the different keys,
like if you wanted one to be the Firefox key,
you can make it, you know, put the little Firefox
logo in there and it will show up on the
key because it's got a little video screen built into
(05:36):
it with little led Shi kind of cool. You could
actually put in animated gifts if you wanted to, so
you can have a little a little yeah, like Sparkle
or twirl or whatever. Um. And this was a big
hit for a while, especially when we kept waiting and
waiting and yeah, this was one of those that was
delayed for a really long time. And and there's a
(05:57):
range of these. That's true, that's true. They a little
le yeah, and and you can choose how many keys
actually have this feature. So if you didn't want to
pay the full one, the the knacked out one, if
you will, as all of its keys uh in O
L O L E de form that one's about um.
But you could get ones the where you're just like, okay,
(06:19):
well just these four keys have the O L E
D S or just the just the function keys um,
and they were less expensive. They're still pretty pretty hefty
price for a keyboard, but if you wanted to uh
and and that, you could even have it where you
could switch out keys eventually. So let's say that you know,
you bought the keyboard, you got it with the ten
(06:39):
function keys, and later on you want to upgrade, you
could do that. UM. Essentially you be paying the balance
of whatever it was to get to the full keyboard.
But but it gave you that option. So people who
just wanted to try it out and see if that's
what they wanted, and they only wanted to drop, say
nine hundred dollars, could do that. Again, I don't think
(07:02):
I'll be buying this keyboard anytime soon. Yeah, and I
certainly wouldn't want to eat my lunch at my desk
if I had one of these keyboards. Right, a little expensive.
And there are other keyboards we could talk about their
their The gaming community has quite a few because a
lot of people have the specialized needs, you know, they
want to be able to fire and have a special control.
(07:24):
They want to frag you in in a fraction of
the second that they could with their old keyboards. Right, yeah, yeah,
I've met you. You you ten year olds out there
who can snipe me from a mile away, and one
day you're going to be old and slow like I am.
But anyway, the two keyboards I was going to talk about,
just very briefly, there's the the Microsoft Sidewinder X six
(07:47):
gaming keyboard and then the Steel Series seven G keyboard. Um,
these are both gaming keyboards. They both can store macros
so that you can program a series of commands and
and assign it to a single key and that way,
you know, you can display your leaked skills by pressing
one button or another instead of like a series of them. Um.
(08:09):
The Sidewinders actually kind of interesting from an aesthetic point
of view, it's back lit with red light. It's red
light glues from around your keys and uh, the sidewinders
eighty bucks. The Steel series is a hundred and fifties.
So we're talking about a much bigger step down in
price from our others. But then again, we're talking about
(08:29):
gaining here or not uh not not some special productions, right,
not a not a big production kind of keyboard. Um,
so yeah, that that pretty much covers my my area
of the keyboards. Did you have anything else on those?
Not on keyboards? On keyboards? Why do you want to
move on to next? Well, I was going to talk
about other kinds of peripherals. You know a lot of
(08:50):
a lot of peripherals that you'll find for your computer
other than the standard mouse keyboard type stuff. Um, a
lot of the high end and and pricing stuff is
going to be for gaming now. Um, it's really funny
when I mentioned the video toaster a few minutes ago.
I'm longtime listeners will probably remember that every once in a
(09:10):
a while, throw in the Amiga because that was my
first computer, and people used to ridicule the Amiga is
a gaming machine, used to well, the thing was It
was way before a lot of the other machines had
full color and had stereo sound, and a lot of
people would build games for it, which were at that
time really high end. UM. But of course those same
(09:33):
people now are buying the five thousand dollar PCs with
the tricked out water cooled UH processors and the high
end graphics cards and the you know steering wheels with
force uh force feedback, and the driving seats where you
sit down in there, and the exactly with all the
pedals and stuff, and those those you know, can cost
(09:55):
thousands of dollars, you know, just as as add ons.
I mean, this is not the kind of thing that
people are buying in in bulk. But you know, oh yeah,
I'll just run down and pick one of those up
one WARLD. I'm just gonna go grab another one. But
there are other other peripherals too, I mean gaming consoles there.
I thought of a couple that, you know, sort of
(10:18):
off the beaten track, because I figured you were going
to go for the computer e stuff and I was
thinking about, well, I mean, gaming consoles are a form
of computers, UM. And I remember a few years ago
there was a game for Xbox, the first Xbox called
Steel Battalion. It was actually highly rated. I went and
and you know, looked up a little information about how
it had been received. But the big news before it
(10:39):
came out, I remember, was that it came out with
this huge console of tan. It's a tank game. Um,
I think where a Mecca game. I was on the
impression of his tank on me. You can tell I
don't own an Xbox anyway. Um, but it came out
with this this uh big board of controls where you
could use all sorts of different levers and buttons to
(11:00):
to uh you know, arm your weapons and move the
thing around. And it actually had more than forty buttons
with two joysticks and three foot pedals, which is you know,
you think about an Xbox game or any console game,
really they're around fifty bucks, right, fifty Well that pushed
the price of this game up to two because it
(11:22):
came with this specialized console, which was one of the
most expensive games out there. Yeah, and and really it's
it's expensive for now. Well yeah, but you see them
a little more often now because you have games like
rock Band, where you were to buy the full rock
Band set that's in the that's around that range. It's
funny you should mention rock band, is it? Yes? And
uh and also the drummer thing going into this, you
(11:44):
can see why I'm I'm kind of keen on this thing.
Um ion Who's booth? I visited at c E S,
but I didn't see actually this particular peripheral. UM. They've
come out with a new uh drum set for a
rock band called the drum Rocker. And it's they actually
worked with the electronics manufacturer Elasis. They make keyboards and
(12:06):
electronic percussion and all kinds of uh, you know, electronic instruments. Um.
And this has four drum pads with a kick drum
and two symbols, and it's it's actually made of aluminum
rather than the plastic that you would find in the
typical rock band kits. So I mean it's it's more robust.
People are gonna yeah, people are really gonna hey, yeah,
(12:26):
thank you for doing that. So I didn't have to
say rock out wait I already did. Um Anyway, Okay,
this this is actually a pretty pricey set too. But
not only do you work over the additional money for
for this set, you also can buy an additional symbol
for fifty dollars, or the drum throne, which is what
(12:47):
we uh call the seat the drummer sits on, and
I still don't know why. Yeah, it's a stool, but
we call it the throne. And then you can, if
you really want, you can actually buy a drum brain,
which is essentially the computer that goes along with the
electronic drum set, the Elasis d M five drum brain. Uh.
You can add that for an additional three sixty so
(13:09):
you don't have to be playing rock band with it.
You can actually use them for regular electronic drums, so
that here, you know, you can just hear the the
chitching sound every time you add on something else too, right,
But you know, if you're really into rock band, yeah,
or if you really really are trying to start up
that flock of Seagulls cover band, or you need those
electronic drum sounds. I told you not to mention the
(13:31):
new wave roots come out, all right, Okay, I see
your console stuff, and I'm gonna I'm gonna switch back
over to computers. I'm gonna talk about computer mice just
really briefly. You want to talk talk about a little
bit about the Yeah, yeah, so you know your standard
computer mouse costs maybe between fifteen twenty bucks something like
that if you want to wireless one and maybe thirty plus.
(13:55):
There's some there's some more expensive ones out there. There's
the Space Navigator mouse, which is that really a three
D mouse um where it looks almost like a paddle
like on the old Attori you know what I'm talking about,
kind of the same thing. You can twist it to
make it go left or right, and you can tilt
it to make it zoom in or zoom out. It's
useful for things like if you're in a CAD program,
(14:17):
UM architecture program, or Google Earth, you can use zoom
in and out and and reorient yourself. UM. Not necessarily
useful for other applications, but it's pretty cool. UM. Then
there are other things like there's the novent Falcon haptic mouse,
which it looks really neat. It's got a base unit
that has some articulated arms that reach out and all
(14:41):
attached to a small UH sphere, and you hold the
sphere and you your motions. You you move the sphere
in three dimensions, so you can move it in and out.
You can move up and down, left, right, and you
can in any direction you want, and the articulated arms
allow you to do that, and your actions are are
transferred into whatever computer realm you're exploring of that time,
(15:03):
and there's even haptic feedback there so we can push
it back against you for certain games and things. Um,
that's pretty cool too. I actually saw one of those
at c E S. I didn't get a chance to
play with it. There was actually a pretty big crowd
around that. But those those look pretty neat too. Uh.
But I was really going to go into the grand
(15:23):
daddy of expensive mouse uh systems here. Um, and it's
not expensive because of its tech specs. Uh. It is
the pet says now computer mouse. It is twenty four
thousand dollars for a mouse for a grand less than
(15:44):
this energy and yet all it does is click And
it's just a regular mouse, except that's made out of
eighteen carrot white gold and has fifty nine diamonds in it,
like like on the on the surface of the mouse.
And you can have it in either a scattered or
flower design. I'm hoping that this is a laser not
(16:07):
at all, so you still have to pull the ball
out and clean. Yeah, you know, but it's it's it's
made from poor people. No, I mean no, it's but
it's it's alright, you go breaking news. Though, before you
can only get in the scatter diamond or the flower
diamond pattern. Now you can use your you can choose
your own pattern and even use your initials if you like.
(16:30):
So if you were holding back because you're like, well
I don't really like the scatter of the flower, and
then now you can actually drop that twenty four grand.
Um it's mainly sold out of the UK. Yeah, I
thought that would be a nice little addition. And then
I was gonna talk also really quickly about monitors. Yeah.
When I was looking for monitors to see like what
would be a really cool, like big high end peripheral,
(16:54):
I found the enlightened i T seven to zero two
seventy two inch touch screen. That's huge obviously. Um, it's
got two different models. There's a three thousand dollar model
which chooses a light pen that has an infrared tip
to it. There's an infrared camera that's the screen is
(17:15):
backlit obviously, so there's an infrared camera on the back
right next to the light source that can detect where
the light pin is. Then there's a four thousand dollar
model that uses cameras mounted on the top of the
screen to triangulate positions. You can you can use your
finger on that one, so you would put your finger
against the screen and the cameras detect where your finger is.
There's no actual touch screen technology on the screen itself.
(17:38):
It's all done through visual like optics. So you move
your finger around and it follows your finger and that's
how you can change the input. So yeah, if you
have three or four grand to drop, you can get
a nice, nice large screen. I don't think our cubicles
would even allow us seventy two inch screen in them,
would they? Probably not? Note to self get bigger cubicle. Excellent.
(18:00):
I was wondering if this is the kind of thing
that we would need if we were going to move
to the next step of the Minority Report era. You know,
you start drawing in the air and until you get
the holographic displays. Yeah, exactly. Boy, those would be cool,
Yeah they would. I bet they're expensive, probably, I guess
that would counts a high end peripheral I'm sure, and
the technology you need to run away from the and
(18:24):
I think we're getting off track here, maybe here, maybe
maybe we can wrap this up. Okay, you think, all right, Well,
there are plenty of other high end peripherles out there.
We didn't even cover sound systems or or other input
systems like Waycom tablets, which are pretty darn cool too,
although most of those are pretty affordable. Yeah. There, I
was looking at a two thou one. Wow. Yeah no,
(18:44):
but it was really nice. Um. So you can read
all about these kinds of systems on how stuff works
dot com right now. We cover everything from keyboards to
monitors everything in between. So check out the website learn
a little bit more about this. Figure out. You're gonna
drop all that massive cash you got sitting around, and
we will talk to you again really soon for more
(19:08):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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