Next Generation of Gyroscopic Controllers on the Horizon

Jamie found a story about a next gen input device that is functionally similiar to the Wii, but instead of using IR, it gets all location information from gyroscopes and accelerometers. This has the potential to be more accurate and maybe not require me to contort my wrist to bizarre angles in order to successfully collect the stars that are like oxygen to me.

Comments

I'll stick with the mouse...

[nullkill]

Any input device that requires you to continually keep your hands elevated will never work. Not to mention, constant movement. The reason a mouse and keyboard is so effective is because you can use them both all day long with little to no effort.

Re:I'll stick with the mouse...

[ezzzD55J]

http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/gorilla-arm :)

Re:I'll stick with the mouse...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Any input device that requires you to continually keep your hands elevated will never work. Not to mention, constant movement.

The reason a mouse and keyboard is so effective is because you can use them both all day long with little to no effort. That's how the Wii got it right. It's like using a mouse with gesture controls. It's not 1:1 movement like people dream of, but you're not tiring yourself out with raised arms, either.

Re:I'll stick with the mouse...

[sakdoctor]

Mouse and keyboard are for old people!

I control my computer with a 3/4 scale reproduction of a Gibson SG

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Guitar-hero-controller.jpg

Re:I'll stick with the mouse...

[MaWeiTao]

The Wii, and pretty much all game consoles ever, have been working just fine with input devices where your hands are "elevated."

No, they aren't elevated. These controllers are held with the player's elbows resting on their knees or arm rests. The hands themselves may be elevated, but there is clearly support preventing the arms from getting tired.

If someone is standing playing the Wii people wont face the same strain because they aren't holding their arm up, relatively motionless. They're swinging the controller around like a tool, However, I can't imagine playing a game like Metroid Prime or Zelda where someone is standing there with arms elevated for hours on end. At that point they'll be holding the controller more conventionally with arms at rest.

And certainly, there's no way in hell anyone would want to sit in front of a computer all day at work with their arms elevated and swinging around.

Still needs camera interface

[BenJeremy]

Motion sensing is all well and good, but you need accuracy with respect to the video screen, and cameras sensing infrared points is the ideal way to do it these days.

I could see a combination providing a much more enhanced experience, though.

The difficulty will come when developers try and create user interfaces that are intuitive and don't quickly tire the user's arms.

Re:Still needs camera interface

[EvanED]

I'm not sure what your point is... A camera recording positions of bright dots is one of the most common motion capture technologies.

It's not exactly like the Wii... the Wii tracks IR emitters, whereas motion capture more commonly uses reflective spheres and a separate light source. Also the camera is stationary, and the light sources are moving in motion capture, whereas in the Wii it's the other way around.

But I would say the two techniques are a lot closer than you seem to think.

Re:Still needs camera interface

[eh2o]

IR tracking has zero drift, unlike accel+gyro IMUs, although, after calibration for the local magnetic field, the magnetometer (compass) can provide the necessary correction. One will have to tell it where the TV is, unlike the wiimote which already knows, but it will still work when not pointed at the IR source so there is more possibility for independent 3D motion tracking.

The problem is, those extra sensors are not cheap (currently) -- esp. compared to the stuff in the wiimote. The $99 price projection is likely a pipe-dream or on such narrow margins that Nintendo would never take such a thing seriously.

Note that TFA says this thing tracks absolute position which is an error -- it tracks absolute orientation. It's position sensing will be short-time relative at best.

"collect the stars"?

[Speare]

maybe not require me to contort my wrist to bizarre angles in order to successfully collect the stars that are like oxygen to me

If that was a reference to Super Mario Galaxy, I'd have to say you must be playing wrong. SMG leverages far less Wii controller range of motion than most other Wii games I've tried. WarioWare Smooth Moves gives a bunch of cute names to various Wiimote controller positions, so it's handy to talk about other games with these terms too. SMG just uses "Remote Control" and "Umbrella" postures, and to spin you need to shake the Wiimote a little. If you want wacky untenable wrist positions, try some of the later levels of Kokorinpa (Marble Mania). There are wrist positions in that game that even Smooth Moves didn't try to name, but I'll call them "Policeman's Thumblock" and "Say Uncle."

It's not the Wii...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Wii is partly to blame for your wrist problems, the lack of female interaction might play a bigger part.

Re:This is the Wii remote, minus functionality

[Gravatron]

wiimotes don't have gyros in them, IIRC. Just an accelerameter.

Where is the TV?

[Telvin_3d]

This is a fine idea for games that are purely motion based. So, the Wii Sports and Tiger Woods and driving games and such. However, for games that need to interact with the screen, AKA every shooter, adventure, action game, it will not work. The Wii sensor on the TV isn't there to tell the Wii where the controller is. It's there to tell the Wii where the TV is. Without knowing where the television is in relation to the remote, you lose the ability to move the cursor on the screen.

Next gen?

[Freeside1]

If you think gyroscopes are next gen, I have just one word for you: plastics.

Article not very accurate...

[sirwired]

The Wii Remote tracks its position via an infrared sensor that users must attach to their televisions.

Firstly, while it is called the "sensor bar", it isn't a sensor at all, it is just a row of IR emitters. There is no receiver on the bar. Instead, there is an infrared camera in the Wii Remote that takes a "picture" of the bar to figure out which way the remote is pointed.

Also, the IR system is only used as as calibration for the accelerometers. The accelerometers in the Wii Remote still do the bulk of the work. If the Wii Remote relied on the IR camera as the primary sensor, it would be useless every time line of sight to the sensor bar was lost. What the Wii Remote does is keep rough track of remote position using the accelerometers, and then when the camera is pointed at the sensor bar, it re-calculates the starting point for the motion tracking to start from.

As far as this outfit using the fact that golf on the Wii leads to bad golf habits in real life: Duh! The Wii is a toy; it is not meant to be an accurate golfing simulator.

I can fully understand Nintendo not putting gyro's in the Wii Remote. It would have driven up the cost, reduced battery life, and introduced a moving part just begging to break.

SirWired

Re:Article not very accurate...

[Paralizer]

Also, the IR system is only used as as calibration for the accelerometers. The accelerometers in the Wii Remote still do the bulk of the work. If the Wii Remote relied on the IR camera as the primary sensor, it would be useless every time line of sight to the sensor bar was lost. What the Wii Remote does is keep rough track of remote position using the accelerometers, and then when the camera is pointed at the sensor bar, it re-calculates the starting point for the motion tracking to start from. The wiimote has factory set calibrations, it doesn't recalibrate itself on-the-fly. The only thing IR is used for is limited yaw calculations, depth (distance from the sensor bar) estimation, and calculating the X,Y position you are pointing at on the screen. For these the sensor bar is used as a primary sensor because that's the only point of reference that can be used to get that information. Everything else you said is spot on though.

Re:Article not very accurate...

[grumbel]

The Wiimote, like any device that tried to figure out position and velocity from an acceleromete You assume that the Wii games do that, but they don't. There aren't games that care about the Wiimotes position in space, they care about acceleration and orientation and little else. The Wiimote simple doesn't have sensors to give position tracking, for one thing the sensorbar only gives you 2 point positions, from which you can derive distance and rotation relative to the sensorbar, but little else, so it is useless for calibration purpose. But more importantly, trying to track position with an accelerometer alone would never work. An accelerometer could only do that if you hold the controller steady, as soon you rotate it around all the accelerometer data gets messed up with gravity and you can no longer know what is gravity and what is actual movement. It also becomes impossible to properly figure out the orientation of the controller. So any try to get position data would get messed up the very second the user moves the Wiimote, which would make it a very pointless exercise to begin with.

IR has more than Gyroscopes

[Paralizer]

Motion detection and pointing are really two different features.

The wiimote uses a 3-axis accelerometer to calculate roll, yaw, as well as gravity forces on each axis; this gives everything except for yaw. Yaw would be nice but it really isn't needed because the shape of the object in your hand doesn't feel nature (or comfortable) to rotate it in that direction. To solve the issue of pointing the wiimote uses a camera sensitive to IR light and captures it at 1024x768 resolution. Since the wii sensor bar has two dots the virtual screen resolution is actually slightly bigger than that.

In addition to actually pointing at the screen the wiimote's IR camera can also be used to estimate the distance you are from the TV. So in all the wiimote has several degrees of freedom:

• Pitch
• Roll
• Yaw (very limited with IR)
• Distance
• X,Y position on the TV

With all of this you get a pretty decent idea of where the wiimote is in 3d space and at what orientation it is at.

Now consider the distance you are from your TV. As you move further away then the angle you should move the wiimote either up, down, left, or right should also decrease because the object. The wiimote can do that because of the IR camera. If you use a gyroscope you lose this because no matter where you are in 3d space it only cares about the orientation it is with respect to gravity. So if you are aiming at the top of your TV and you move backwards with a gyroscope then it will still be aiming at the top, whereas with the wiimote it will go above the top because that's where you're actually pointing the device.

With a gyroscope and accelerometer you would get:

• Pitch
• Roll
• Yaw

That's about it. No distance, no X,Y position.

I think the wiimote still wins out. The only thing that I would change with the wiimote is give it a higher resolution IR camera, but maybe that was too expensive for Nintendo (that may also have been a reason they didn't do high def?)

Also you can already use the wiimote on a PC for free and have millions of potential customers already owning one. So why would anyone want to pay royalties to use this thing?

to go boldly

[lymond01]

Whenever I see new handheld gyroscopic devices I think of one word:

Holodeck.

Re:This is the Wii remote, minus functionality

[Kaeluka]

I worked on an application using quite similar accelerometers, a few years ago. We used the ADXL103, while the Wiimote uses the ADXL303, which is basically the same sensor, but with three measured directions. What we tried to do was measuring distances - quite similar to the Wiimotes goals. What we found out, however, was, that the sensor just isn't exact enough to provide reliable velocity- or even position-Information. The problem is, that the provided accelaration-data have to be integrated (even twice, for position-measuring). That can't be done so easy, without adding up the noise as well. It wasn't too much of a problem in the end, because we needed the sensors for demo-purposes only, but that was the problem we found out. Here is a link to a picture. We used three sensors to measure X, Y and Z-directions, the lines should return to zero after the vibrations, but they didn't ;) http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/85/komischacropfz8.jpg I don't say, that it can't be done, what I'm saying is: it might be hard.

Re:The Wiimote's failures

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

2) The design of the Wii remote is similar to that of the earliest handguns: basically a bar which must be held forward in order to aim. And, like those models which were ultimately abandoned, it has a major flaw. The default aiming position forces the wrist's pivot to one extreme, rather than in the middle of its range of motion, as a contemporary handgun would. This is a strain, and particularly so whenever the need arises to aim lower. The Wii remote compounds this flaw with the need to use the thumb to access buttons and controls on top of the device. For a dramatic illustration of this flaw, grab your Wii remote, point your arm straight ahead, point the remote straight ahead as though aiming at something parallel with the remote, and now access the d-pad with your thumb. Try this while aiming down. Visualize playing a game for several hours like this. Now visualize using a Wii remote which fit the hand like a hand gun and decide which would cause fewer problems for the wrist. a.) Not all games on the Wii are shooter games. Your suggestion for adaption would hurt those games in the same way you're complaining about now.

b.) The Light Zapper accessory addresses this problem, and you don't need $100 new controller with less features to do it.