Soon You'll be Able to Use Multiple Mouse Pointers in Windows

Posted 02/05/2010 at 5:52pm | by Ryan Whitwam

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It’s all the rage these days to have multitouch technology baked into software. Now Microsoft is letting us know that having multiple pointers could be cool too with the new MultiPoint SDK. The new v1.5 release is available for download and will allow developers to create applications that use multiple mice simultaneously. The SDK could allow groups to work collaboratively on a single PC.

Having a single computer interpret commands from multiple pointers could be a boon to education, says Microsoft. Many schools have fewer computers than students, and sharing PCs doesn’t always work because only one person is really able to interact with it at a time. In the recent demo on MSDN’s Channel9, some beta applications were shown off using three pointers.

While Redmond seems to be pushing education as the big sell, there could be other uses. There are times when a single computer with two independent mice could work just as well as two computers. The SDK is compatible with Windows 7 and Server 2008. Make sure to check out the video demo. If you’re the developer type, the SDK can be found here.