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Using Your Head As A Joystick
Ant sent in linkage to an article about Cybernet Systems and their new Use Your Head gaming peripheral that tracks head movements and uses them as input for games. Works using a USB Cam, and obviously its not gonna be running under Linux any time soon, but this is pretty sweet. When
they have the version that can detect me cursing and use that to signal a retreat, I'll be happy ;)
It makes Street Fighter games realistic right down to the concussion!
Go ahead, try doing 12 dragon punches in rapid succession.
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Coming from inside Cybernet, I have a bit more info on the product for those that are interested.
:)
First, the product uses very little CPU (less than 5%) and given that it runs off of normal webcams (which typically have a framerate of less than 30fps) has little lag.
Second, the product is purely "optical" - you don't have to attach dots or sensors or anything to your head.
Third, the device isn't meant to replace the keyboard/mouse/joystick (I pounded mightily on the UseYourHead group in the beginning that gamers - specially FPS gamers - will never want to go away from their controller of choice) - but it basically gives you an unobtrusive tertiary device.
Fourth, it moves by tracking translational movement (left, right, up, down) not rotational movement of your head (twisting). It was obvious from the start that a device requiring you to take your eyes off the screen was a bad idea.
Finally, a bit more information about the tech. UseYourHead runs off of Cybernet's Gesture Technology which was developed on various Military R&D contracts and is capable of identifying complex gestures, where a "gesture" can be a series of positions by anything from your hand to your head or even your feet or something held in your hand. Think of slapping a camera on your TV and never having to search for your remote again because you can wave the channels up or down, or use simple signals to specify a channel.
UseYourHead is the first foray into commercial-land for this technology. We wanted something simple, something basic, something useful. Originally intended almost entirely for the first person shooter market, we recognized the basic motions most people make when playing those game is to weave, duck, and try to peer around corners, over ledges, ie. head tracking. Head tracking is *really* simple for the gesture tech, the hard part was getting it to work as fast as possible with the relatively slow web cams.
As a first pass, UseYourHead takes head movements and lets you map them to keystrokes. Its the simplest setup that allows UseYourHead to work well with almost all existing games. However, game developers can directly integrate support for UseYourHead (through a DirectInput wrapper) and have a more continous motion. Imagine your screen as a window into the virtual world, and as you try to peer around a corner, the game smoothly shifts to give you the correct perspective. Even more interesting, game developers can use our tech to access more complicated gestures. For instance, the game Black & White has a system for casting spells in it that requires you to make gestures with your mouse, imagine being able to use your hand directly to make those gestures (Somatic components from D&D
Oh, and while UseYourHead is meant for Windows, all the original tech runs on various versions of Unix (Cybernet puts out a Linux product called Netmax as well)
Feel free to email me if you have any questions, or visit Cybernet's web site for more company info)
Ron Hay
rhay@cybernet.com
Game Designer/Developer
Cybernet Systems Corp
I knew this rang a bell - here's a 1995 game for the SGI Indy that uses the indycam as a 3d input device. From what I remember it was kind-of-usable but not exactly pinpoint accuracy. Got it at home somewhere.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
This thing could be dangerous! In some of the battles we've had at work would have given me whiplash for #(*$ sake!
(Ok, it's only $30, people will expect it to be not-very-good, and no, I haven't tried it).
We have some expensive VR kit, including head trackers. Guess what, they have noticable lag - this is custom hardware, and not cheap. How fast is a software program that tries to analyse the position of your head from a webcam going to be? My guess - not very.
I wonder how much CPU it needs to do it too (whilst you're playing Quake III)...
Mike.
ps) Would still be fun to get for Christmas though, I guess they are releasing at the right time.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
Why are you knoking your head over the table?
I'm out of ammunition and now I'm using my bare hands...
These guys aren't the first, or even the second company to propose this sort of pointing system.
The Nod was a pointing device developed by Sage/Stride in the pre-ibmpc dawn of computing that worked by sticking a reflective dot to your forehead and standing a sensor on your monitor.
It didn't sell well, because people felt silly sticking a reflective dot on their forehead and wiggling their head around to move the pointer.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
*Sneeze* .. 'Bugger, I fell off that cliff again'
http://twitter.com/onion2k
The low frame rate problem would probably be exacerbated when you consider you would probably have to move your head a fairly large distance (at least an inch ? ) for the software to be able to reliably detect movement.
Also, it seems like a camera pointed directly at your head is only going to be able to discriminate between four directions (head up, down, left, right), and wouldn't be able to easily detect (head forward, head back), which might be important directions if you were playing a FPS.
Finally, I wonder how sophisticated the motion detection scheme is ? How would they deal with, e.g. the rotation of your head, which might look to a simple-minded scheme like side-to-side movement ?