Onomatopoeia Cursor: Verbal Mirroring of Mouse Movement with Comic-Style Lettering
The mouse cursor has remained visually mute for half a century: it shows where we point, but says nothing about how we move. We present the Onomatopoeia Cursor, a shipped macOS overlay that classifies cursor kinematics in real time and renders Japanese mimetic words (onomatopoeia) as animated comic-style lettering above the cursor -- "kyorokyoro" (glancing around) for rapid horizontal reversals, "sorosoro" (cautiously) for slow careful motion, "byuun" (whoosh) for fast straight strokes. The system reads seven input channels and displays roughly sixty word forms across five languages. Crucially, the form of each word fluctuates with the manner of action through a morphological generator grounded in Japanese sound symbolism (voicing = weight, gemination = abruptness, elongation = extent, reduplication = iteration). Beyond the rule generator, an on-device onomatopoeia-only transformer (0.4M parameters, 9.7 ms per word) trained on 2,782 mimetic words synthesizes novel forms from the manner of an action; for sound-definite events, a family-anchored generator constrains synthesis to the correct phonetic family. Characters are rendered with hand-drawn outline perturbation, brush-style deformation, and per-character animation grounded in manga lettering conventions. We articulate the design space of verbal motion mirroring, formalize the pipeline as a learnable differentiable mapping, and report a technical evaluation of what is actually implemented and measured. Our central conjecture concerns the sense of agency: formative first-person use suggests that naming a movement while it happens perturbs the felt authorship of the action -- modulation, amplification, and interference -- and we outline a within-subjects study with salience-matched controls as future work. No user-study results are claimed; the contribution is the concept, the working system, and its design space.