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Haptic Battle Pong... Future of Game Interface?
An anonymous reader writes "The Sensable Phantom is a premier force-feedback haptic device and sells for a few thousand dollars now, but when that number comes down, the game industry will be jumping all over the idea of six-degree-of-freedom, precision-force-feedback video games. It looks like Haptic Battle Pong may be the first attempt at a true 6-dof, force-feedback game. It's not Quake, but maybe this is the next big thing in video games?"
Thats nothing compared to my classy joypad
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
That device looks remarkably like the tools 3D developers use to model objects based off sculptures. These basically read coordinates from the real 3D space that your working on, such as a sculpture of a bust, and then places vertices in the corresponding 3D space in the computer program, Maya, Softimage, etc. These devices cost a lot because of their precision. If you wanted to get laser-mouse quality movement & precision, you'd need to buy one that cost $2000+. I imagine this Phantom device follows the same system as the 3D coord mapping device. As mentioned in the write up, these devices would definately be able to have a very full range of motion, otherwise gamers would be breaking these things a lot for any range of reasons. Looks interesting however, we shall see where this goes.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
I don't want the real world, I want to escape it.
Can I bum a sig?
GTA3 PC barely supports reconfiguring the mouse and keyboard to anything managable. I really have to work around the awkward controls.
It's impossible to steer the car very well in mouse steering mode, and it's impossible to walk around and look easily where you are going without using the mouse for walking. So you get this lameness of having to change your hand positions whenever you get into or exit a car. The game rocks, but more freedom in binding the controls would go a long way.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Well sure, I've got used to it as well, but I'd far rather be switching from wheel and pedals to mouse... I guess my point is really that we (as purchasers) do demonstrably put up with and work around developers skimping on control options. I don't see the advent of these devices as offering a compelling reason for developers to spend even more time developing and testing with yet another possible control device, when developers today don't have time to even support the most obvious devices.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has an interesting project on using Haptic Brushes for virtual painting, which is pretty neat.
They have something called Interactive Haptic Painting with 3D Virtual Brushes which was also presented at Siggraph. Very cool.