SpacePilot Pro

April 20, 2009 (The New York Times) It’s not for the casual gamer — or the casual anyone—but the $500 SpacePilot Pro, arriving courtesy of Logitech subsidiary 3Dconnexion, is full of wow for designers and engineers who work in three-dimensional computerized environments.

SpacePilot has a built-in color LCD screen, which can display e-mails, messages and other customizable visual information, but the substance of the mouse is to expedite workflow and navigation through 3D spaces such as Autodesk Inventor, Microsoft Virtual Earth and SolidWorks.

Of course, mouse geeks will have to have one, if only to gaze gaga-like at sexy blue lights and the Darth Vader form factor—the buttons on SpacePilot make BMW’s confusing iDrive simple by comparison. The big knob in the center twirls six ways, and it tilts and rolls as well. In Logitech-speak, the device has “six-degrees-of-freedom sensor technology … by lifting, pressing and turning the controller cap, design engineers can easily pan, zoom and rotate without stopping to select commands.”

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