So how is it? Personally I found the mouse to be a little smaller than I would like... but then again I have big hands and prefer larger mice like the Intellimouse Explorer. Anyone who likes the size and feel of any other 'normal' sized mouse should feel right at home with the shape and size of the Vmouse.
I'm also not a huge fan of lefty/righty mice as they pretty much compromise total comfort for one handedness to get both adequate. That said, southpaws should love this mouse as it feels exactly the same in either the right or left hand. As for the button performance and mouse tracking, it's about on par with any of the other ball mice out there with the exception of the more exotic high-end gaming mice. It feels almost identical to the older Intellimouse designs in both tracking and wheel performance.
Gaming is really what I was wondering about with a product like this, specifically FPS gaming as it seems to be not only the most popular form, but also the most mouse-driven. Since the mouse is triggered by anything coming out of your sound card, any noise that you hear in a game will be translated to vibrations in the mouse.
Menu sounds, ambient sounds, music, anything that's coming out of your audio port translates to shaking of some kind in your hand. Since you can adjust the volume and intensity levels for the mouse, coming up with a balance that you're comfortable with is pretty easy. You can either have it shake your hand off or be barely noticeable depending on your preference. I fooled around with some Quake 2 single player and some Quake 3 multiplayer to get a feel for how the mouse 'felt' in the FPS world... and was both impressed and turned off by the results.
In Quake 2's single player I found the mouse's vibrations added to the game's immersion in certain situations. Since single player (without music of course) is generally a fairly quiet experience until the action gets really heated. Ambient sounds, weapon sounds, sounds of enemies and earthquakes in game translated fairly well to the mouse and definitely made playing a little more interesting (especially since a shaking mouse is far more difficult to aim). I found myself a little more drawn into the game with the addition of "feeling". Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it certainly made things more interesting for single player gaming.
While single player was fun with these vibrations, multiplayer gaming was a different story. I first tried a little FFA action in Quake 3, something that I realized later was a much more noisy experience than single player gaming. Because the Vmouse takes all of its vibration cues from the sound card, the erratic and constant noise of a frag fest really makes the mouse shake... even to the point where aiming becomes significantly harder to do. While this might add to a 'realism' factor in a single player game, it's really more of a handicap in multiplayer death matches.
To try to get a little more of a quiet multiplayer experience I tried out some 1 on 1 on Q3Tourney5 (a map so clouded in fog that you pretty much have to use sound for any cues). This experience was a little better than the free for all of the previous game, but didn't really seem all that compelling to me. Because the vibration really doesn't react to anything that you can't already hear there's really no tactical advantage to having it, and since 1 on 1 can get plenty loud, aiming is again made more difficult in firefights.
The other selling point for the Vmouse is what it can potentially add to web sites. In this respect there really isn't much out there right now, and is something that I'd find pretty redundant anyway. While having vibrations triggered by web sites is certainly a cool idea, something is lost when you're hearing the sound at the same time. Sure it's nice to 'feel' what you're hearing, but as of the time of this article there really isn't much web content that would take advantage of this. Personally I'm not a huge fan of web sites distracting me with sounds anyway. And yeah, I won't discuss the 'other' kinds of web sites.