Marketing creates new techincal challenges

Today I went into Dick Smith Electronics (similar to the UK’s Maplin’s stores) and bought a new mouse. It cost me $28 - not bad considering it’s a nice hold, scroll-wheel optical mouse but one thing did strike me as odd - it’s a “Optical 3D Mouse”. Now this concerns me greatly and I feel as if I have been cheated.

After I plugged the mouse in I found I was only able to move the mouse pointer in TWO dimensions. I cannot work out how to access the third. Even if I do manage to work it out, I’m sure my laptop doesn’t support the third dimension (depth in this case, left-right and up-down seem to be fine).

It is of course possible that the product title refers to the fact that the mouse itself exists in three dimensions - but they have forgotten to include the fourth (and theoroetically the other 12 or so, I’ve lost count now) as this mouse definitely exists in the fourth dimension as well. If the title refers to the amount of matter that this product displaces in the current universe, why are other products not sold as such? How about Burger King’s 3D Whopper or KFC’s new 3D, 3 piece quarter-pack? The marketing guys have missed the boat there.

One final possibility exists - that the ‘D’ in ‘3D’ doesn’t stand for ‘dimension’, in which case I shall leave it up to you to choose what it might mean.