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Failed Controller-Free Gaming Devices of the Past
adeelarshad82 writes "While Microsoft does get points for innovation, Kinect for Xbox 360 isn't the first attempt to make gaming a hands-free affair. Decades before Microsoft would release its depth-sensing camera system, other companies tried to take the gamepad out of the gaming equation. PlayStation, Dreamcast, NES and Sega have all been there. These attempts varied in usefulness, ranging from somewhat functional to laughable and pointless, and from the forgettable to the downright infamous."
I think the bigger story is that after all these iterations... developers still don't know how to properly use the hardware.
People envision that Kinect will be used for sign language recognition and creating custom animations/taunts (actually waving bye to that Pyro wanker's head).
Will we ever see a developer use the hardware? Or will they just use it shallowly and default to what they know for anything of substance?
Apparently it is time to rip on the Power Glove yet again. As I, unlike some of the people who write negatively about it, actually owned one, I would like to give my piece on the matter. In particular, I would like to point out that indeed there was one good game that worked with a regular controller but worked exceptionally well with the power glove.
Unfortunately, that game was not Punch-Out (with or without Mike Tyson). Punch-Out was a massive pile of failure to end all massive piles of failure with regards to the power glove. For some reason some idiot programmer thought that a good way to set up the power glove for punch-out was to move your hand forward for a punch, and then backwards for a power punch. Which of course meant your only power punch was gone pretty well immediately and then you were hosed for the rest of the round.
No, the game that worked well with the power glove (while not being power glove specific) was Top Gun. That game had very sensible controls; move your hand, move the plane. First two fingers are your weapons. You didn't need anything more than that. Unfortunately few people ever used that great combination.
I suppose it is probably a good thing that some of the MS engineers who worked on Kinect are actually too young to have ever tried to play punch-out with a power glove. Because if they had, they might have started out with the idea that motion control without a controller could never work properly.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I thought the whole point was to move your hands, instead of pressing buttons with your fingers. Have all these articles and reports mentioning Minority Report been wrong? And where's the innovation in voice commands? Is it the fact that your XBox won't "set so double the killer delete select all"?
The first article fails for not mentioning the Atari Mindlink.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I love the Power Glove... 'cuz it's so bad.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Unless of course you had a ring of dungeon master control...
And the Wii was a me too device answering to others, at least for the Wii a lot of the 'others' were nintendo devices. They have a good history is failed gimmick controllers.
Once again, the key is a gimmicky 'addon' will never get the full game support it needs to be massively popular enough to give the kind of profits the Wii has. The Wii worked because it was the game system. All games support it.
I thought this was game-controller history 101. Probably somewhere in console history 202 as well.
They forgot another of Nintendo's creations that also used motion and rarely anybody remembers! It's the U-Force!
I actually found the Jaguar controller to be pretty comfortable.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I'm pretty sure one of the kids in that Power Glove commercial is the kid from The Wonder Years.
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/angry-video-screwattack/34014
Well that article was short, but riddled with inaccuracies. First of all, none of these devices can be described as "controller-free" - there's no such thing. They are simply alternative controllers to your standard joystick/gamepad/buttons/analog stick/lightgun etc controls. You must have a controller (e.g. a means of interaction with the images on screen) in a video game, otherwise it's not a video game. And the end of the article categorizes the U-Force as "hands-free", when it does require using your hands.
And of course, there's other "alternative controllers" that the article doesn't mention. This includes some of Konami's hardware - like the voice-activated LaserScope for the NES and their motion sensors for games like Police 911 and Mocap Boxing.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
And that if they made Knight Boat.
God spoke to me.
Its well known that MS actually bought the tech from an over seas company. Either way though its an impressive piece of machinery for a company first try. I picked one up after reading mixed reviews, and being a guy that must have the latest gadgets I decided not to fight my inner geek. I actually love this thing. My only complaint is the most common. LAG! But what I found was despite the fact you have to adjust to the lag, you do. 10mins after turning it on, I was use to doing everything 1/3 of a second early. I wonder if its a USB limitation, or the lack of an onboard processor. The voice commands actually work well, as Im a person that cant enunciate my R's very well, this was a bit of a surprise. Some complaints about unresponsiveness have gone unnoticed by me. When I do something, even in fast succesion it happens on screen (nothing like making your avatar jerk off). I think Kinect was a good step to controller-less gaming, and albeit not perfect, is definitely fun. I have a Wii that I have only used a few times, a PS3 I love for offline gaming (but no Move) and a 360 now with Kinect. I'll still have to get the Move before I make a verdict. But i enjoy bowling/boxing more on the 360 than on the Wii. Not to mention ping pong is a blast!
I went 3 days after launch expecting to find a ton of Kinects in store after the mixed reviews, but when I went to futureshop there was only a single unit left. I was shooting the shit with the guy in the game/movie section, and he said demand was far higher than they predicted. Interesting considering the device is far from perfect. In the end though, I have had a ton of fun so far. I just dont know when the novelty will wear off (like it did with the Wii) but this is just my 2 cents on the Kinect after a few days use. I really like it, but time and games will tell if it can be a Wii killer, just like the PS Move also hopes to be. At least sales wise I dont think initially this can be classified a failure, and use wise I also wouldn't call it a failure, just not a complete success. Solve the lag issues, get some longer lasting games, give a better menu system than holding your hand over a button (have you ever tried pausing with Kinect while playing?!?! you have to stand still for like 2 seconds) and extend the Kinect use to incorperate voice commands at all times, and it could be.
No Odama or EndWar? Odama was a hilarious exercise in controlling armies composed of tiny men getting crushed by a giant pinball/boulder, and it worked acceptably well.
It certainly isn't a me too device to the Playstation Move, given that it was announced and demo'd long before the Move was.
It's fundamentally different from the Wii, similar mainly in that both are alternative control schemes to the traditional gamepad. The Move is fundamentally similar to the Wiimote, although the different technology might make it better (don't know for sure). It may well be that the Wii's success paved the way for Microsoft to think differently, but it's not really the same thing.
That doesn't mean the Kinect will be a success or anything. I haven't tried one yet. Just that it's different.
Is it though? both new additions are both coping motion yes, but they both went about it in different ways. Playstation used a similar device to the wii, but added a light and camera to improve accuracy. So it technically should be an improvement over the Wiimote. MS went a different way and purchased a company that dealt with cheap motion detection systems. This made their system controller-less and different. Yes both Sony and MS jumped on movement based gaming, but both used different approaches which could turn out to be better. Both companies are bending to demand so obviously the Wii isn't meeting the expectations of some gamers. Gamers are asking for a new solution, why is that bad? Its like saying Porche copied GM.
The powerglove actually was much much more useful for people developing VR gear at the time and for even a decade after, despite it's ultimate fail on the NES. Not until the Wiimote has there actually been a useable "floating pointer", and the glove actually had finger controls so that VR systems actually could see a "closed hand" and a "giving the finger"
That said, the power glove was ahead of it's time, and rather extremely inferior to the wiimote in terms of how positioning is determined. The Optical flex in the original design was better, and turning a "wiimote" into a "power glove" is in theory practical.
In fact, the patents on the power glove technologies should be expiring or expired, which may suggest why we've never seen any better devices on the market.
The Kinect, and the PS Move is ultimately going to fail, much in the same way the iPhone's touch screen are absolute fail as controllers. They don't address the user friendliness aspect and are a "input device" looking for a game. The Wii made the motion controls part of the "Wii" package, so every game could use or not-use as needed.
When Microsoft get's their ass in gear and actually stops making "cheap breakable crap" like the Xbox360's several revisions, and release the next generation console with this technology built in, then developers may actually fully utilize it, but please don't throw my controller away yet, as not every game can be a song and dance routine.
Look at the DDR and Rockband controllers. These controllers come with the game... no other game uses them, and the people who really love the game buy the more expensive controllers. Every additional game in the line up can still use the first generation controller, as far as we can tell. However I don't think we'll see "playing piano on Kinect." The technology isn't there yet, and you can tell from the cheap low grade cameras in the Kinect tear-down that there is not enough resolution to tell individual fingers unless the player is within 2 feet of the device.
new school
For what it's worth I had a lot of fun playing mike tysons punch out with the power glove esp loved the uppercut combo. You would always get a better score with a max but it was fun.
I hope the new xbox controller is accurate and not laggy. Wii games would have been a lot of fun if you did not have to fight the technology.
The internet today is primarily composed of top 10 best or top 10 worst lists. They sure make up a lot of content, and I suppose they get a lot of clicks. Heck, they even slipped that iphone pinball advertisement in there without losing their cool.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I was so happy when I got the Sega Activator for my birthday. That lasted for all of 20 min...and that's including setup time.
I am not sure there is a demand anymore, everyone that wants a 2005 game console probably already has one, needing more sales they looked at what did out sell them and lately get in on the action
one major problem though, nintendo, and lets face it, they could give you a turd on a stick and it would sell like hotcakes, infact they DID with the standard wii controls and it sold
also nintendo historically is a very gimmicky company, they have products that last in sales but only cause of things like color cases, picachu edition, new backlight, 3d, motion controls, and that is fine cause they are sold and marketed as cheap toys, microsoft and sony items are marketed as investments in entertainment, and this latest fad of "me too's" cheapen the product
sony especially, look at the PSP, there for a while they were introducing new models every freaking year, thats fine for a 99$ gamebox, not so much for a 200$ psp
The PowerGlove may have been a failure as a game controller, but it was a boon for those of us trying to create Virtual Reality systems with our home equipment. Rend-386 was the software only rendering engine that let us create a virtual handshake coast to coast with powergloves. 3D Rendering went on a MAJOR growth rate curve in the 90s (doubling every 6-9mo). Unfortunately 3DUI didnt do so well. The professional gloves were better than the P-glove, but still not all that great, even 10yrs later. I've still got my dual-glove PC controller. I just dont have a working 386 computer anymore.
I bought a PowerGlove specifically so I could use it with some DOS-based VR app that was developed for a 286, way back in 1992 or so. I cannot remember the name of the app, but it allowed me to use the PowerGlove to interact with objects in a 1990s-era virtual reality world. You could reach in, pinch an object to grasp it, pull it "outwards", rotate it, etc.
Does anybody know the name of the app that I'm talking about? Best use of a PowerGlove - I even bought a 2nd one so I could (successfully) modify it into a left-handed PowerGlove, but sadly my programming skills back in 1992 was nonexistent and I was never able to get two PowerGloves to get recognised by the app. The PowerGloves has long since been consigned to the trash, but I probably still have a copy of the app on one of the stacks of 5.25" floppies in the attic somewhere.
The Wii also uses a light and camera, the setup is just reversed. The Wii has the camera in the controller and the light in the sensor bar, from what I heard Move lacks accuracy when it comes to pointing (which is mostly rotation) while of course having more when it comes to detecting controller movement (which is mostly translation). Yes, the Move has a gyroscope but that's not nearly as accurate as the sensor bar setup when it comes to determining where the player is pointing since the gyroscope will drift and the camera cannot recalibrate it (since the light is spherical).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
..Failed SlashDot Articles of the Present
TFA (yeah yeah, I know, I wasn't supposed to actually read it) seems more like an advertisement for Kinect to me. I actually owned a U-Force and it worked without a hitch, even the flight-stick accessory. But oh well, guess they were going for that whole "Thanks for liberating us from the oh so sucky past, Microsoft! Now could you pay us?" thing.
Haha yeah I had a first gen PSP and all the later revisions really pissed me off. In the end my netbook replaced it as my cheap travel companion because it wasn't a hassle. It didn't require converting movie formats, it didnt require almost weekly updates (which if you used custom firmware became a chore) and could play better games.
I had a motion sensing flight stick for my PC back in the mid 90s and this is even older. The Wii controller didn't introduce anything all that groundbreaking.
huh? The depth sensor is actually the easy bit and has been around a while. The hard bit is definitely the generic skeleton recognition in a non specific environment.
>>The rest - skeleton recognition - is not especially hard. And MS doing it not quite well.
As someone who worked for a company that licensed tech to do this about four years ago, I can assure you that single camera skeleton recognition is not an easy problem in the slightest.
Do none of you remember that 3DO is the company that thought in their ultimate wisdom to be the first to have only 1 input-port on the console that extends to a controller and then that controller has a port for anothe controller to extend onto and ad-infinitum?
Daisy-chaining was by no means exclusive to the 3DO; pre-USB Sidewinder gamepads for PC also used it. But better-engineered platforms used a hub topology:
The Odama mic is the GameCube counterpart to the Hey You Pikachu mic, which the article mentioned (if I read the same article you read). But almost everyone in my country forgot about Odama after the 2008 U.S. Presidential election campaign as a side effect of having to keep Obama and Osama straight.
I have never seen a laptop with only one USB port.
Allow me to introduce you to the Macbook Air which had only one USB port on the original version.
From the article: "Sony dabbled twice with console-based webcams over the last two generations, and it only got any success after it introduced the Move."
From Wikipedia: "As of November 6, 2008, the EyeToy has sold 10.5 million units worldwide.".
10.5 million sales is most definitely a success by any definition.
The whole article strikes me as a Kinect advert: "Despite the occasional misinterpreted gesture, Microsoft's Kinect offers impressively immersive game controls and voice commands, all without needing to lay your finger on a single button."
Apparently the camera streams video to the console at 30fps. If the camera worked at 120fps like the PSEye or Wiimote sensor then it would give the console enough time to process it before it had to draw the next frame in the game. For it to seem 1:1, Kinect games may have to run at 15fps.
So it's okay to constantly refresh models at the $100 price point, but not at the $200?
its much less of a problem at a lower price point yes, and typically they added value where as sony did not
for example gameboy vs gameboy pocket vs gameboy color
or GBA vs GBA SP, vs GBA micro
what did sony do?
psp phat to psp slim, made the case cheaper and more apt to break, while only shaving mm off the thickness, and you had to buy new accessories
psp slim to psp bright, which did add a brighter screen, but at the cost of image quality
psp bright to psp go, which made it incompatible with everything previous, so not only did you have to buy all new accessories, but your games also
Ya know, to be honest, I don't find any added value between the revisions of either devices that you mentioned. I just think it was bizarre to choose the price point as the straw that broke the camel's back. Breaking the accessory compatibility (of official ones) and games really is fucked.
well with the gameboys
pocket halved the battery requirement, had longer play times and a better screen (and I think bigger)
color gave well color and slightly better battery life
gba sp added a backlight and better battery life, micro added even more battery life
the sony revisions actually decreased battery life in the case of the phat vs the slim because they had to use a smaller battery to fit into the thinner more fragile case, the bright reduced it a tiny bit more
I was wondering if perhaps MS had to create an actual product in order to strengthen their patents on this, because on the surface there isn't much chance Kinect succeeds as a $150 addon that in turn needs a large established base to get games made for it.
I agree that the developers should not let such potentially ground-breaking technology be frittered away with trivial games. Nintendo really broke the mold when they diverted from the typical gamer applications and went after the physical therapy possibilities that presented themselves through the use of the Wii. That choice opened up an entire new world to all of the platforms if they'll simply open their minds to the possibilities. They should put forth the efforts and resources to really perfect what they've got and develop the applications for all of the potential users including the almost limitless uses in the medical/rehab fields. Keith {http://www.theperfectmirror.net}
Thanks... I've used a some sort of newer gameboy once and didn't realize they really changed so much. Just thought it was like new color cases or something.
Not true; although the PSP2000/3000 used a smaller battery you got the same amount of game time as the 1000 through some effeciencies gains with the newer hardware components.
There were also a few trivial additions as well such as inbuilt mike and I believe there was more ram that allowed for better caching of the UMD.
The way I see the PSP's refresh cycle (with the exception of the PSPGo) is more akin to the GBA > GBA SP > GBA SP (B (The B had a better internal back light)), the 2000 like the GBA SP got rid of some heft, included a few minor features and a better backlight, in turn the 3000 improved on the 2000 slightly by again including a few minor features and a better backlight. The difference between the 2000 and 3000 were minor and was marketed as such, the PSP Go was like the GBA Micro.
Uhhhhhh no. That is completely backwards.
Depth sensors are relatively easy to create. Full body motion capture from a 3D shape is very difficult to do.
Not true; although the PSP2000/3000 used a smaller battery you got the same amount of game time as the 1000 through some effeciencies gains with the newer hardware components.
not according to my tests, yes close but no not the same, in the red
The Wii has the camera in the controller and the light in the sensor bar
I don't think it's so much a camera as a photodiode.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
If you go into the Wii's controller calibration screen, you can see an image of exactly what the wiimote's IR camera sees. The exact technology is irrelevant, it can capture and image therefore it is a camera.
Well, if you can determine the direction of multiple light sources with just a photo diode, sure.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It's a low resolution monochromatic camera (looking through filter transparent to IR); it's just that the data output is not as a video stream, but as locations of light sources tracked in its FOV.
One that hath name thou can not otter
When I first read about "Kinect" I immediately jumped forward several iterations. What I expect from gaming hardware is the eventual ability to play a FPS game standing, holding fake guns, pointing them at the screen. We'll probably still need a joystick on the gun to turn completely around, but imagine how much fun this will be? There will be many other uses for the technology, but considering how well FPS games sell, I consider this the ultimate goal. We may even be able to switch from a rifle to a pistol by putting down one controller and picking up another; I'm hoping this is what the future holds.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.