(Credits: Pranav Mistry)

If the magic of Apple mouse you already seemed science fiction, then take a look at what he has invented Pranav Mistry, a researcher at MIT.

It's called mouseless (literally "without a mouse") and the name says it all: a real mouse, invisible, or rather that there is a mouse, even if it is as if there were.

The trick is all in a technology based on two key components: a laser source and an infrared camera, both placed near the computer monitor in order to interpret the gestures of the hand just as if he were holding a mouse. The first creates an infrared beam that "illuminates" the movements of the hand (including clicks on the virtual button) so that the camera can recognize them and transformed into cursor movements.

The potential of this technology, says its inventor, is also more than what you can do with the current mouse. Improving vision algorithms, for example, you can use a more extensive library of gestures in addition to the classic point-and-click. For example, the multitouch gesture typical of the world, such as a compass pointing index finger and thumb to zoom in and taught us the photos as the iPhone. Not to mention that using a larger number of infrared laser sources becomes possible to interpret a range of almost endless hand movements, gestures somewhat complicated combinations.

A subject for lab rats? Not at all. Pranav Mistry has already indicated that just 20 dollars to build a prototype of the mouse invisible. So a technology that is just waiting to be tested and adopted by a corporation's ambitious.