Shocking Force Feedback Ideas

Erston writes "It seems as if this could really make it to market. Mad Catz is working on a game controller that will zap you with electrodes when you are on the receiving end of your enemies' weapon. The story is here. I hope the zapper will work without the controller- I'm a keyboard/mouse fragger myself. But the more senses that I can get involved in Quake, the better-- There is also an interesting trivia piece on the bottom of the page that talks about electroshock/bio(force)feedback and how it relates to a chimpanzee in the pre-manned spaceflight era of NASA. . . " I've been using similiar technology to train CowboyNeal to get me coffee/cookies/girls and so far it hasn't been successful, but this appears to be much more practical.

Comments

We did this with the TI-85

[ry4an]

Back in 1995 a friend of mine wrote a low grade FPS for the TI-85. For feedback when shot he'd send data down the calculator's TI-Link cable, the other end of which was placed in the player's mouth. It wasn't painful, but you definately felt it.
--

good training

[austad]

Actually, using this will most likely improve your Quake, and other FPS game. Now you have an actual reason to avoid being shot, it hurts.

When I used to play Laser Tag as a kid, I didn't care if I got shot. But when I switched to playing paintball, I became a much better player because it hurts like hell to get shot with a paintball (big red welts).

Did and Done

[Cylix]

My friend already did this...

He made some simple source changes to quake and some electrodes that sit on the mouse. There are several ports for arm straps, nipple clips and whatnot.

When you take damage, you take some electricity, it is quite painful. You eventually learn to not fight, but run instead. It really harms your game ;)

This was/is his senior project in college.

So, if they apply for a patent, we might have some prior art already.

Nooooooooooooooo!!!

[legLess]

I went in for carpal tunnel testing last year, and this is exactly what it was like. They put sensors in various places on my forearm and upper arm, then shot electricity through my finger-tips to measure the nerves' resistance. Fucking hurt, too, and I couldn't pick anything up for the rest of the day.

Hmmm ... maybe once these things come out, some enterprising /. reader can reverse-engineer it (ala :::Cue:::Cat:::) to be a carpal tunnel testing device.

I got my ass kicked at Quake last night, but that damn Mad Catz controller said my nerve conduction was at 87% nominal. I don't understand it, man - I've been ice-packing for days just trying to get it over 85%, but it didn't help my game at all!"

Then we could create a mod to show nerve conduction next to ping. There'll be a black market in Multiple Schlerosis drugs and horse steroids as kids everywhere strive to get their conduction up 5%. FanBoi magazines will run articles, and for the first time in history vitamins will become popular amongst pasty white teenage game geeks, "This B6 complex increased my conduction, like, 1% last month, d00d! I'm saving up to buy the d-Alpha Tocopherol E next, man, that cut-rate d1-Alpha doesn't help much at all."

question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes

It's not the voltage, it's the current

[localroger]

The human body has a fairly high electrical resistance. According to the article the current is limited to 16 mA, which is safe. It's at 20mA and above where a badly routed shock starts to seriously scramble your nervous system.

The voltage it takes to push that 20mA through your skin can vary wildly. Human beings do not conduct electricity very well, and if you play with an ohmmeter you will be able to get skin resistances ranging from a few K-ohms (especially with contacts placed near one another on damp skin) to megohms (with distant contacts on dry skin). It is theoretically possible to electrocute yourself with voltages as low as 40VDC, but it's not easy to do and requires very good electrode placement, skin conductivity, and a weak heart. I am assuming that the game controller uses voltages lower than this so that no matter where you put the electrodes you can't pass enough current through a sensitive enough part of your body to do serious mischief.

I'm sure they wouldn't dare sell this for such a trivial purpose if it weren't lawyer-proof. They must consider people who will put the electrodes on the wrong part of their body for whatever reason. (I predict this will be a hot seller to the S&M folks.)

Old news. This was a Spacewar mod.

[zauber]

See Brand's 1972 article on Spacewar! in the Rolling Stone:

Within weeks of its invention Spacewar was spreading across the country to other computer research centers, who began adding their own wrinkles. There was a variation called Minnesota Hyperspace in which you kept your position but became invisible; however if you applied thrust, your rocket flame could be seen.... Score-keeping. Space mines, Partial damage - if hit in a fin you could not turn in that direction. Then "2½-D" Spacewar, played on two consoles. Instead of being God viewing the whole battle, you're a mere pilot with a view put the front of your spaceship and the difficult task of finding your enemy. (Perspective could be compressed so that even though far away the other ship would be large enough to see.) Adding incentive, MIT introduced an electric shock to go with the explosion of your ship. A promising future is seen for sound effects. And now a few commercial versions of Spacewar - 25 cents a game - are appearing in university coffee shops. Steve Russell still dreams: "Something which I wanted to do is get some interesting sort of fleet action. There are some versions of Spacewar which allow two, three ships, but as far as I know no one has been sufficiently clever to set things up so there are ships with noticeably different characteristics that could fight in interesting combinations."