In order to save on battery life of your laptop, have a searchlight style mouse-pointer - so that only a small radius (configurable) is lit-up at any one time - the pixels on the rest of the screen would not be lit at all.

It would probably need two "searchlights" really - one for text-cursor also.
-- monojohnny, Jul 24 2006

I like the effect, but does it really save a laptop's batteries when only part of the screen is lit? (Compared to the whole display being turned on or off.)
-- DrCurry, Jul 24 2006


Here's the problem: when in use, a laptop screen is always fully lit. The backlight is always on. A fully black screen is still lit behind the LCD panel.

There may be a miniscule amount of power savings afforded by 'spotlight mode', but I seriously doubt that it would be measurable outside of tightly controlled laboratory conditions.

However...
If OLED or plasma ever gains a foothold in laptop displays, this might just work.
-- Freefall, Jul 24 2006


just turn down your screen's backlight partially. that's a good way to conserve battery and you can often tell your computer to do it automatically when it's unplugged from the power.

other good ways to conserve power are to turn off wifi and don't use removable media like cds that need to be kept spinning.
-- tcarson, Jul 24 2006


Although this approach would have no benefit for LCD, it could be quite useful with OLED backlighting if it was easy to adjust the size of the 'spotlight' and the 'background' intensity.
-- supercat, Jul 25 2006


Actually, I thought of another use for this: using a computer in a dark room without disturbing others. The amount of light visible to others is proportional to the total amount on the screen; having a small area that's well-enough illuminated to read easily while the rest of the screen is bright enough to see navigation points might allow the computer to be used at a lower "overall" brightness level than would otherwise be practical.
-- supercat, Jul 28 2006


This is daft. Half the time what I want to look at is nowhere near my cursor.

Now if it tracked eye movement ...
-- BunsenHoneydew, Jul 29 2006


How would you know where to look?
-- Ling, Jul 29 2006


Very good Ling, I bun that anno!
-- DesertFox, Jul 30 2006


If it tracked eye movement efficiently, you would never know it was happening. Kind of a solipsist mouse pointer...
-- GutPunchLullabies, Jul 31 2006



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