Catherine Tompkins, associate dean of McMaster's School of Nursing, said, "Simulation technology represents the wave of the future and will provide our students with the state-of-the-art tools necessary to further their training and prepare them as the leaders in our future health care environment."

More mousing around

The computer mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute in 1963 after extensive usability testing. It was one of several experimental pointing devices developed for Engelbart's On-Line System (known as the NLS), which was both a hardware and software system. The other devices were designed to exploit other body movements -- for example, head-mounted devices attached to the chin or nose. The mouse won out because of its simplicity and convenience, but other pointing devices remain in use, including trackballs, touchpads, pointing sticks, lightpens, joysticks, head pointers, eye-tracking devices and various kinds of digitizing tablets that use a stylus.

The first mouse was bulky and used two gear wheels perpendicular to each other; the rotation of each wheel was translated into motion along one axis in the plane. When Engelbart received a patent in 1970 for an "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System," he expected users to hold the mouse continuously in one hand and type on a special five-button keypad with the other.

A later variation on the mouse, invented in the early 1970s by Bill English at Xerox PARC, replaced the external wheels with a single ball that could rotate in any direction. The ball's motion was detected using perpendicular wheels housed inside the mouse's body. This variant of the mouse resembled an inverted trackball and was the predominant form used with personal computers throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The Xerox PARC group also settled on the modern technique of using both hands to type on a full-size QWERTY keyboard and grabbing the mouse as needed.