Mouth-Operated Mouse! - Quadjoy
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,644 words · ~8 min read
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how would you play games on your pc if you couldn't use your hands
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your first instinct might be to use your feet uh maybe even with a foot
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controller like the beacon or the stinky footboard but then what if you couldn't use your
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feet either in that case you might be tempted to get more uh creative
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but fortunately for the many people out there including many gamers who struggle
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to use a conventional keyboard or mouse there's another option introducing quad
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joy a mouse you control
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with your mouth speaking of mouth my mouth saying these
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words about our sponsor kono kono is excited to introduce the hex gears x1
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keyboard a low profile bluetooth mechanical keyboard with multi-device
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connectivity in a beautifully machined aluminum case check out the link below
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to learn more
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so how do you control a mouse with your mouth well the first step is to actually
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get this device close enough to your face which quad joy accomplishes with
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a clamp and a mounting ARM now there are two styles of clamps available and this
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is the most popular one there's also this like kind of pipe mounting clamp
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one which can grab on to pretty much anything so it's better for wheelchairs
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but it's almost three times the price and both of them can connect to the
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mounting ARM in multiple orientations so this one this little bit unscrews and
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you can put it on any one of these five mounting points and then this one
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you either put it on sideways and mount it here or here or here or you put it on
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this way and mount it up here that's what we're going to be doing then you
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got your mounting ARM this thing is heavy duty af like it's sturdy enough to
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keep the device in place and air like look i'm waving it around and it's not
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bending but it's also flexible enough
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that you can tailor it to your exact setup and it'll stay exactly where you
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want it's also got this really nice articulating end here that again really
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nice quality you just loosen up configure however you want it tighten it
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up with just one knob and boom
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this gives you the precision you need to get the quad joy to your lips please
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stand by while Linus installs the device
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so the mouse itself is basically
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a single joystick so you can probably see the cursor moving around
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but with the added ability to respond to your breath so out of the box it's
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totally plug and play with no software required and the basic i don't know i
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guess you could call them like gestures that it's pre-programmed with or a sip
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for left click or a puff for right click
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cool right now there is a learning curve so to get to
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the same level that i would have with my hands would take tens if not hundreds of
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hours but the folks at quad joy have done their best to make it as easy as
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possible first of all there are led indicators that you can actually see out
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of your peripheral vision so it's easy to tell for example when you've entered
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what they call scrolling mode all you've got to do is puff
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until this indicator turns green and then you can puff and sip in order to
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scroll up and down a page pretty cool
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and there's the totally optional quad joy desktop app that lets you take these
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default actions and greatly expand them you can do a ton of
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tweaking to everything from how the stick behaves to pointer speed and
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acceleration to even the required breath force it's actually pretty deep and the
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best part is the amount of customization that they give you with the gestures
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with just sipping and puffing so like
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you can program up to 12 different actions with basically whatever key
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binding you want so so you could you know puff soft then hard for ctrl alt
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delete or to launch the calculator or whatever the case may be it's awesome
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but wait there's more actually a lot more
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so you can execute functions with multiple types of gestures
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not just sipping and puffing like by moving the stick to the edge and holding
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for example check this out
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there it is and you can actually create
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a gesture to switch modes giving you a
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whole other layer of commands on the fly
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using those same sips and puffs or hold stick to edges and then what's cool is
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you can import and export your settings so you can optimize the mouse or the
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quad joy as it were for different applications on your computer leading us
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of course then to the question with all this customization can you game on it
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did i help you
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we're really in the net
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all right so believe it or not it depends on the
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game you can actually play something like rocket league with near full
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functionality since all you need is movement with the stick and then boost
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and jump can be done with your breaths
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pretty cool right and even mouse-centric games like rts
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rpg or board games were shockingly
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functional now the tricky genre is FPS
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so can it run crisis
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okay technically this isn't crisis but whatever the same principles apply now
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to do this properly you'd really want two joysticks one for looking around
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and then one for moving and we couldn't find an effective way to do both of
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those things at the same time on the quad joy so the best we managed was
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using the stick to look and then just inhaling to move forward and then
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puffing to shoot now it technically works but it's a pretty bad time
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but what if you used the stick to run around
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then stopped switched mouse modes to look around a
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name and shoot and then switch back to keep moving
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that's basically what twitch dreamer rocky no hands does
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and odds are he can absolutely pwn you at fortnight however he uses a different
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controller the quad stick so would this approach work on the quad joy
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unfortunately no because the software doesn't let you
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bind stick movements to key presses like
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up equals w what they do offer is a sold separately
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210 dollar feature called joystick mode
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that we actually ended up needing third-party software called joy to key
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to fully utilize it does allow you to move around using
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the stick oh dang it
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but it creates a new problem so they don't actually let you do gestures in
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joystick mode so you have no way to quickly switch
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back to mouse mode when you're done moving around
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and it's time to aim and fire at something
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all right then so assuming you're in the market for a mouth mouse should you buy
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the quad joy uh if you're a gamer well it's clearly
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not designed with gaming in mind but for
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general computer use there are really a lot of great things about it
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that are hampered by a couple of complaints one
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the amount of play on the mounting ARM
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is in our minds unacceptable for something that costs
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complaint number two this much
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this wiggle in the mount right down here amounts to a significant dead zone in
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either the x or the y-axis depending on
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which way you mount it and at fourteen hundred dollars
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quad joy costs about double what the quad stick does and that one has been
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proven to be performance enough for competitive gaming and with multiple
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mouth options so i don't see why you might not start
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there instead though to be clear we haven't tested
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any of the other products in the market and we're not really the target consumer
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for these products anyway the purpose of this video for us was to experience a
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type of mouse input that we had never tried before and draw attention to a
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segment of the market that really doesn't get talked about much so if you
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have experience with either of the products we've talked about or maybe
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another one we didn't cover please leave a message in the comments section below
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speaking of below below we're going to have a link to brilliant
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brilliant believes that effective learning is active not passive and
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learning from lectures and videos isn't as effective as diving in and doing
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things for yourself and brilliant provides you with the framework for
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thinking about and solving problems so it's kind of like a problem-solving
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website that teaches you to think like a computer scientist by guiding you
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through problems so they take a concept break it up into bite-sized pieces
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present clear thinking in each part and then build back up to an interesting
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conclusion so head over to brilliant.org forward slash Linus tech tips and get 20
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off today we're gonna have that linked below
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so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked this video sorry
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my mouth is actually kind of tired if it sucked you know what to do but if it was
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