Clicky

This Egg-Shaped Input Device Skips the Mouse Pad Entirely

If you buy something from a link in this article, we may earn a commission. Learn more

Ovo Mouse Not a Mouse on Kickstarter

Most people assume wrist strain comes from bad posture or too many hours at a desk. It rarely occurs to anyone that the shape of the object sitting under their palm might be the actual problem.

Price: From $145 | £108
Where to Buy: Kickstarter



The mouse has kept the same basic form for four decades: a plastic dome you slide across a flat surface, gripped the same way no matter your hand size or wrist angle. Nobody questions that shape, mostly because nobody has offered a real alternative to compare it against.

NextAxis Design bet on that assumption directly. Its device, OVO, just closed a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign under the tagline “Not a Mouse. A New Way to Point,” and late pledges are still open while it trades the slide-and-click motion most people have never had reason to question for tilt, rotation, and balance.

Add The Gadgeteer on Google Add The Gadgeteer as a preferred source to see more of our coverage on Google.

ADD US ON GOOGLE

What OVO Actually Changes

OVO is a small, glossy, two-part shell that weighs about 98 grams and measures 48 x 61 mm, close enough in size to sit fully inside one hand. Instead of reading motion across a flat surface, OVO reads the orientation of your hand in three dimensions. You tilt and rotate the device to move the cursor, and clicking and scrolling still work the way they always have.Ovo Not a Mouse




The entire shell is capacitive multi-touch, so the surface responds more like a touch panel than a device you wave through open air. The two-part design splits duties: the top half handles tapping and cursor control, the bottom half handles swiping and scroll gestures. NextAxis Design hasn’t detailed the exact engineering reasoning, but the likely goal is keeping an intentional tap from being confused with an incidental grip shift.

Crowdfunded objects that promise to fix an annoyance nobody else is addressing are a familiar shape for us, the same instinct behind the compact power stations and robot vacuums that show up in our coverage most weeks. OVO fits that pattern closely: a small object claiming to solve a problem most people stopped noticing years ago.

Picture the last time you spent six straight hours scrubbing through a video timeline, nudging objects around a 3D scene, or clicking through fifty slides during a rehearsal. Somewhere in that stretch, your wrist probably rotated the same twenty degrees a few hundred times without you noticing, and that repetition, not any single motion, is usually where strain actually builds. OVO’s pitch is that continuous rotation replaces the repeated dragging behind that fatigue, at least for tasks built around a timeline or a viewport rather than pixel-level precision.

What the Specs Actually Mean

None of OVO’s numbers matter on their own. Here is what they translate to in practice.




At 98 grams, OVO is light enough to use in the air or on a desk, which matters most if your workday already moves between a laptop tray, a couch, and a standing desk. Battery life rated up to 80 hours per charge, with USB-C or wireless charging, means charging becomes a weekly habit rather than a nightly one, though a wireless pad is one more accessory to keep track of.

Ovo Kickstarter Device

Bluetooth or Wi-Fi support with no drivers required means fewer setup steps across Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, not necessarily a faster raw connection. The $109 early pledge against a $199 planned retail price marks a real gap between backer and shelf pricing, standard for Kickstarter hardware, though $199 also puts OVO in the same range as premium mice that already have years of driver support behind them.

None of that comfort math survives contact with a plainer truth about crowdfunded hardware: the demo video is not the interface. A device built around tilt and rotation asks a hand to unlearn motions it has repeated for years, and Kickstarter backers do not get a return window if that relearning curve turns out steeper than a two-minute pitch video suggests. The campaign closed funded on June 18, and NextAxis Design still lists December shipping, which is, as with nearly every crowdfunded hardware timeline, a target rather than a guarantee.




Ovo Peripheral

Who This Is Actually For

OVO is worth watching if long stretches in 3D software, video timelines, or presentation tools already leave your wrist sore by the end of the day, or if you like building custom macro profiles for different apps. The per-app profiles and reassignable gestures NextAxis Design is promising are aimed squarely at that kind of user, not at someone replacing a mouse for general browsing.

Ovo Mouse

It is easier to skip if you need pixel-precise input right now. Competitive gaming and fine photo retouching are exactly the tasks a brand-new input method tends to fumble first, and NextAxis Design does not claim otherwise. It is also easier to skip if backing a Kickstarter means expecting a finished product on your doorstep next month. Here, you are funding a prototype and a small company’s ability to manufacture and ship it, not making a retail purchase with a return policy attached.




Price: From $145 | £108
Where to Buy: Kickstarter

Bottom Line

OVO does not fix the mouse. It questions whether the mouse’s shape was ever the right starting point, which is a more interesting bet than another spec bump. Whether tilting and rotating actually beats thirty years of muscle memory is not something a Kickstarter video can prove, and NextAxis Design has not claimed otherwise. If the idea appeals to you, back it knowing you are funding that open question, not a finished answer.



Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *