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TrueMotion Game Controller a Step Up From Wii Remote
Harry McCracken writes "One of my top picks at the Consumer Electronics Show was Sixense's TrueMotion, a game-controller technology that resembles the Wii's remote, but uses an electromagnetic field to provide far more precision — it knows the exact location of the controller in 3D space and which way you're pointing it. (The Wiimote only knows which direction you're moving the controller.) TrueMotion-based remotes are due by Christmas, bundled with a PC game for under $100."
According to the Heisenburg uncertainty principle its impossible to know both where an object is precisely, and where its heading.
The statement "The Wiimote only knows which direction you're moving the controller" is not accurate, The Wiimote has a three axis accelerometer in addition to an infrared camera. The camera looks for two infrared LEDs on the "sensor bar" and depending on the distance between the LEDs and their position in the image from the camera the Wiiremote can fairly accurately determine where it is pointed on the screen.
I Don't Work Here
There is no economic sense in a game developer using this. Until Microsoft mandates that a bit of hardware is required for a "Genuine" windows machine, it will not factor in to any rational developers plans. And in this case its never going to happen, because it notionally excludes laptops, and no matter how painful it is in reality to play a mouse and keyboard game on a touchpad, its still "possible".
Anyway, MS want PC gaming dead just as much as everybody else now that X360 has been a relative success: any hardware innovation has to come from single source manufacturers, and in reality that means console manufacturers - and only Nintendo actually wants to even try - and Apple. All the clone makers just like to cower in a corner and pray for a behemoth like Intel, MS, or Google to innovate for them...
Its sad really, that the 80's with myriad incompatible silos of innovation seem so bright nowadays...
I don't know about you, but when I use my computer, I'm sitting at a desk with a keyboard and a mouse. I'm too close to my monitor to start pointing a remote at it.
I also can't imagine putting the remote down, use the keyboard, picking the remote again, repeat.
The Wiimote is a great idea because we can't really use a mouse when sitting in front of a TV, and crappy, small, over-touchy analog sticks on a gamepad is a stupid idea to begin with.
A Wii in the home will strengthen any family.
"The family that plays together...stays together."
"The family that Wiis together...is unhygienic."
Squirrel!
Console gaming will never be more advanced then computer gaming and it shouldnt be.
Console gaming IS more advanced then computer gaming for the sheer ability to just plain work as advertised.
How many console games require a new graphic card, new processor, more memory, DirectX/drivers updates or OS upgrades?
You plug it in, turn it on, drop in the CD/DVD/cartridge and it works.
No half hour installations, needles restarts, patches that take several hours to download and install...
For actual gameplay - consoles have been kicking PC's ass for years now.
But, if you find fiddling around your PC, spending insane amounts of money on hardware upgrades and kicking it once in a while JUST SO YOU COULD PLAY A GAME a part of the experience - well good luck with that.
Only game niches where PC still keeps the crowd entertained with greater efficiency are RTS, FPS and MMORPG games.
For an idiotic reason that console makers refuse to allow onto their consoles games that require plugging in a mouse into their consoles AND comparatively high price for multiplayer gaming.
The second reason being that you need the console+game+online/network access&support+TV screen for each player.
And while each member of the household can validate the need for a personal computer - it is not so with a personal TV and gaming console.
So there tends to be more PCs per household member than consoles, which gives multiplayer gaming on a PC a lower minimum requirement threshold.
Hopefully, with new console's ability to go online something will also move up from the lower regions of the body to the heads of console and console games makers and we will finally enter the era of games that you can JUST PLAY.
Not install, service, update, patch and set up more than you actually play the game.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Perhaps I'm overly cynical of input technologies, but my take from the movie is that this is a *disaster*.
Start with the best configuration the company could manage for the demo, with in-house software, and an experienced user. The system is still laggy and periodically jerky. It has the same lack of feedback as the Wiimote, so you need similarly simple gestures to make it usable. Their one advantage is that the position sensor should be orientation-independent, whereas the Wiimote's camera needs to see the sensor bar.
If memory serves (and it often doesn't) the two major problems with EMF position sensing in AR are range and interference. Range should be solvable for a local input device. Interference worries me. With a near-optical system, interference sources are obvious: if your Wiimote has problems, look around for the strong light source.
Of course the blog-based press releases do not bother communicating actual benefits or limitations of the technology, beyond "ooh, shiny!" and "ooh, revolutionary!".
Only game niches where PC still keeps the crowd entertained with greater efficiency are RTS, FPS and MMORPG games.
And like nobody plays those!
Only game niches where consoles beat PCs is local multiplayer games sitting in the couch and eventually RPGs.
You plug it in, turn it on, drop in the CD/DVD/cartridge and it works.
No half hour installations, needles restarts, patches that take several hours to download and install...
You evidently haven't used a console recently, I've experienced all of the above with mine.
Not to mention the fact that my 4 month old 360's DVD drive decided to die recently. Now I have to piss about with Microsoft getting the console replaced. If that takes 2-3 weeks, I've lost 2-3 weeks of gaming. It usually takes me on average 30 mins to install a pc game&patch (10 hours a year), and a day to get a new DVD drive, I can live with that.
As far as needing to buy new hardware for new games? I buy a new gaming PC every 4 years, Halfway through my third cycle. I have *Never* needed to buy hardware to play a new game (Excluding of course, the rise of 3D Graphics-Once). I've had to turn settings down a couple of times, but never to the point where poor graphics interfere with gameplay ( In COD4 multiplayer I used to keep all settings low out of preference, not need)
I Spend £500 every 4 years. Even if every PC game I bought was available on the consoles I'd spend WAY more on the extra cost of console games (20 Games a year average, £10 extra cost due to console tax is £800 extra, not including the cost of the console)
I Spend a LOT more money per console in the long run than I do on my gaming PC, despite playing about the same of games on all of them.
Consoles are good, So are PCs. Your arguments alas, are not.
How many console games require a new graphic card, new processor, more memory, DirectX/drivers updates or OS upgrades?
The NES, Sega Genesis, Neo Geo, N64, and probably other consoles I can't remember have required memory upgrades to play certain games. The Dreamcast, PS2, Original XBOX, XBOX 360, and PS3 have OS updates and game patches. I can't think of any console that offered a processor upgrade off the top of my head (the Jaguar maybe?).
No half hour installations, needles restarts, patches that take several hours to download and install.
Except the PS3 which requires large hard drive installs for many games. Or Last Remnant, which requires a hard drive install on the 360. I don't know about the giant patches you're talking about. You're probably talking about MMO client updates. There ARE no MMOs on the console except Final Fantasy XI which distributes such client updates on discs.
Only game niches where PC still keeps the crowd entertained with greater efficiency are RTS, FPS and MMORPG games.
The reality is more that genres change. PC gaming used to be dominated by point and click adventure games and flight sims. These genres didn't transition to the consoles, they faded in popularity. "Devil May Cry" style action-adventure games were big last generation, in this generation, not so much. And speaking of RPGs, console RPGs are widely incorporating elements from PC games, particularly MMOs (see FFXII) not the other way around.
Facts: PC game sales have been going up dramatically every year. Certain genres, and even certain games, have dominated PC gaming since it's inception. Those genres change over time.
People have been predicting the death of PC gaming since before it even started. It's not going to happen unless people stop using PCs or manufacturers refuse to make gaming hardware for PCs.
local multiplayer games sitting in the couch
As more and more people hook their PCs up to their TVs, I wonder if split-screen gaming will come to the PC? I wonder if, now, you could plug four wireless USB keyboards and mice (or game controllers?) into a PC, run four instances of, say, Quake 3 in windows (with each configured to use a different keyboard+mouse/gamepad for input), and play a multiplayer game through a server on localhost -- so everyone can play on your big HDTV from the couch? Obviously configuration would be at least a minor pain in the butt, but I imagine the process could be automated -- perhaps by an OSS program with a database of user-contributed "presets" for different games?
Followup 2:
These guys had the same idea. In the discussion beneath the video, they talk about using programs called "xpadder" and "autohotkey" to control both windows simultaneously. From the sounds of things, this is a promising approach, but people haven't invested a lot of time into figuring out these program's scripting languages in order to make this work.
Followup 3:
It seems that xpaddr converts gamepad button presses to keystrokes, and autohotkey is used to send those keystrokes to the correct windows. These guys have gotten this much working. Yet although dual-mouse drivers exist, I have not found people who have gotten two mice working independently in different instances of the game. That said, if you're content with using a gamepad instead of a mouse, this seems to work.
It'd be nice if this mishmash of different software could be bundled together as a single "play games splitscreen" program -- which one could imagine also doing other things, like stripping game windows of borders and decorations, and aligning them all to precisely fill the screen automatically.
A completely different approach would be to use the split-screen desktop software that Microsoft should be releasing before too long, which should (hopefully) make this easy.
Finally, in all of this I haven't considered tricks with Wine and Linux; I assume that some things (like multiple mice) might be easier in such a framework. But I think that for games, a Windows-based approach is probably, if we're honest and not too ideological, much more practical.