Back in December, I talked to Dan Rosenfeld about the capacitive version of the Mouse 2.0 project (we also went by the Fab Lab where mice are born). Hrvoje Benko is a researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research and is also working on the project. I recently stopped by Benko’s office to get more info and a detailed look at how some of the optical versions of Mouse 2.0 may work.
In this video, Benko walks us through a deconstruction of the Orb mouse prototype and the FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) mouse prototype.
The latest products to come out of 
At TechFest this year I met with 
Closing our CES 2010 coverage, this is a look at some of the hardware that Lenovo currently has or will be offering this year. It includes everything from the typical business machines to contemporary all-in-one machines, even a laptop that lets you game in 3D (they tell me all DirectX games are 3D compatible.)
John interviews Silverlight MVP David Kelley about developing multi-touch applications in Silverlight. David discusses the types of multi-touch hardware and his experiences in developing real world multi-touch applications. Then he jumps right into the code and shows how to create a multi-touch application with Silverlight 3 or 4! The application David demonstrates walks through the key multi-touch events, handling those events, touch IDs, tracking the location of the touch points, and much more. Being a sly devil, John even got David to commit to coming on the show again and demonstrating some advanced multi-touch samples and sharing his stories of how developers have broken their monitors using multi-touch!
Inside the Microsoft booth at CES is a row of computers that we call Muscle Beach. These are some of the latest PCs from partners that will be coming out over the next year. I’m really impressed this year with some of the forward thinking features hardware companies are coming out with, like the dual monitor netbook shown here. My favorite had to be the Pegatron slate though. This device shown in the keynote has an 11.6″ screen with an Atom processor, 1GB RAM and 32GB HDD. It’s so light and portable, it would be perfect to carry around the house for reading and remoting into the other PC’s around my house via Mesh. With so many different types of devices, there’s something for everyone.
Microsoft’s Gary Schare demos some of the new hardware for Windows 7 at CES including network media devices and touch-enabled monitors that will allow you to multitouchify your current laptop or desktop.
Microsoft’s 
There is a somewhat little known department here at Microsoft called the Applied Science Group and they do some truly incredible work. They are the research team behind Microsoft Hardware. I met up with