deskthority

I've been wondering whether or not if this will work. I'm pretty sure that it won't, but I'm wondering if anyone has tried.

Maybe opaque glass will work, I have no clue.

Crap, I just noticed there was another thread on this.......

IIRC someone has tried various balls in their optical trackballs (modern Kensington Expert, maybe Orbit) without success, due to an imperfect shape and especially the lack of visual patterns that stock balls had.

It might be possible to do this with, say, an infrared LED and sensor and a ball that is transparent in the visual spectrum but opaque and textured in the IR. (Or pick any other wavelength through UVA, the concept remains the same.) That is to say, how you see the ball and how the sensor sees the ball don't have to be even remotely the same.