Victor is one of the people behind Dynamicland, the "live paper"/"room is the computer" startup that was shut down recently. That was on HN last week or so.<p>Fancier input devices seem to have come and gone. They peaked in the 1990s, when you could see a lot of them at SIGGRAPH. My favorite was the magnetically levitated sphere in a bowl. It was like a 3D joystick/trackball with force feedback. It was really cool. It never sold. There were lots of gadgets like that. An animator friend had a workstation with a keyboard, a knob box, a button box, a joystick, a trackball, a tablet, and two screens. Some of the people doing Jurassic Park had a model dinosaur where you could move all the joints, the computer could read the angles, and the on-screen image moved to match. None of this ever caught on. Even 3D joysticks are rare. Game controllers with two joysticks caught on, but those joysticks are abstractions of what's on screen, as, for example, steering, not direct interaction.<p>I tried Jaron Lanier's original gloves-and-goggles VR system. You couldn't do much with the gloves. That was pretty much true in later glove systems. Autodesk fooled around with VR in the 1990s, but determined that gloves and goggles were not going to make CAD easier.<p>Lack of force feedback is a huge problem with gloves. Without force feedback, it's like trying to work in oven mittens. Much of human precision is tactile feedback. Without that, precision work is slow and tiring. As everyone who's soldered surface mount parts under a microscope knows.<p>Back in the 1990s, when I was working on collision detection and physically based animation, I considered building an input device I called "The Handle". The Handle was to be a jointed arm, like a robot arm, with a grip handle on the end as an input device. A servomotor system (or, for cost reasons, I was thinking brakes only back then) would provide tactile feedback. The handle itself would have the ability to split, like pliers, so you'd have something to squeeze.<p>The Hammer could potentially simulate pliers, tongs, wrenches, hammers, etc. Do simulated auto repair. Assemble Meccano. This would have been what Victor is calling for.<p>Could it be built? Yes. Would it sell in volume? No.<p>That's the problem.