Skip to main content

Mauz transforms your smartphone into a lean, mean – and versatile – gesture control machine

mauzGesture control technology continues to gain traction thanks to our increasing comfort going without the mouse and keyboard. Touchscreens have taught us to do without and we’re getting more and more familiar with eschewing these accessories.

Technology like The Leap and Kinect (and the many apps leveraging it) continue to push our progress here by giving us motion-based interactions with our PCs and TVs – and now, a new product called Mauz we spotted at CES will transform your smartphone into a gesture-friendly tool.

Mauz is a dongle that plugs into your iPhone, and then launches its own app to make your smartphone an incredibly versatile device. You can connect it to your PC and use it as a trackpad, dragging your finger across the phone’s screen to control your PC. You can right click and left click – all from your smartphone. The idea is to evolve how we control our electronics, allowing users new, intuitive, natural ways to use applications like PhotoShop or Google Earth.

Replacing your traditional mouse with what essentially becomes a multi-function trackpad isn’t all Mauz does. Within the app, you can also decide to enable gesture control, so the dongle and app partner to work as a sensor and you can wave your hand over the smartphone to navigate and control your device. Creator Gilad Meiri says this is intended to “simulate a Kinect-like experience.”

There’s also its Wii-like functionality, where you can pick it up and use it to remote control your device by waving it around as need be.

Meiri says the team just launched a KickStarter campaign to gauge interest – which might be a good goal, given the fact that they’re trying to raise $150,000 toward Mauz’s development. Regardless of the crowdsourcing campaign, Meiri says he expects to offer a beta version of Mauz (which he currently calls a “production-ready prototype”) in March or April and release the first iteration in June. He tells us this is a consumer-facing product – it’s not exclusively being shopped around to OEMs.

“Cost is an issue that still needs to be resolved,” Meiri says, although he figures it will cost “between $60 and $70.”

This market continues to grow while simultaneously becoming more and more accessible to the average user – and the simplicity of Mauz is both ambitious and exciting. We’ll have to wait until spring and summer to see if Mauz breaks onto store shelves. 

Editors' Recommendations

Molly McHugh
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Before coming to Digital Trends, Molly worked as a freelance writer, occasional photographer, and general technical lackey…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more