PowerCursor is a Flash toolkit that web designers can embed in their designs to have interfaces with tactile properties – like slope, roughness, motion, etc. – by simulating them in terms of visual feedback. For instance, if you hover your cursor over the “Hills” area, your mouse cursor moves much slower when going “upslope”; if you run your cursor in the “Maze”, it can only follow the paths, etc. This brings yet another dimension into websites that are traditionally thought of as flat papers – “webpages“.
The application could be interesting – giving textures to a website. For now I can’t quite imagine a site which would be enhanced by this – maybe Flash games. I just hope that Flash web interface designers would take a page from history: let’s not have a whole barrage of “texture-enabled” websites that serves little to enhance, or even deteriorate, the usage experience, ala “Skip Flash Intro”.
