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Google Super Sync Sports Turns Your Phone Into A Gamepad
Deathspawner writes "Using a mobile device to control an application on a PC, media player or video game console, isn't too uncommon, but it is when the content being controlled is a game. Just how possible would it be to play a fairly fast-paced game on your PC via your mobile device? Google wanted to find out, so it crafted a game called Super Sync Sports, where you control an athlete on your desktop or notebook via controls on your phone or tablet. To make a game like this possible, Google turned to WebSockets for real-time collaboration between two devices, HTML5 for the audio, Canvas for the graphics, and CSS3 for the styling and transitions."
It appears that it routes your controls through the Internet rather than locally. Something like this over bluetooth or wifi with a shared touch screen might be cool for electronic board games.
This is about browser-browser communication, using your android as a bluetooth gamepad/mouse/remote is old news, there are a million apps to do just that.
WebRTC could let the two browsers talk through the local wifi, instead of having to bounce off the 'net.
there's also the latency issue, something no one thinks about when it comes to hype like this, limiting the application of such a device to less real-time genres of games.
...I can't see such a thing taking off...
A lot of things Google does never take off. The point is that they make cool stuff even if there's little or no business case for it. I like that they are always showing the untapped potential of the ubiquitous tools we already have. I like that they make ways to make things work together, then share the tools for us all to use.
That and the fact that unlike the Wii U GamePad, phones have no physical buttons for the application's use. Power, volume, and quit are all reserved for the system. This means all controls must be on the screen, and the player won't know where to press during any phases that involve looking up at the big screen. Unlike physical buttons, a flat sheet of glass gives no tactile feedback.
That's actually exactly what Google was thinking about when they decided to check out WebSockets, which kills the standard HTTP overhead and keeps an existing connection open between client(s)/server.
LegendMUD
What you describe is AirPlay Mirroring, which requires close physical proximity.
This submission is touching on Google using WebSockets for game communication over the internet, which is far different from your example, and has 2 distinct advantages over AirPlay:
- There is no proprietary protocol requirement using specific hardware.
- Gaming can be played between people who aren't physically located together.
LegendMUD
Great. So I can use my phone as a third-rate shitty gamepad that's going to misfire, register phantom touches, ignore deliberate ones, kill me 7 times before I make it to level 2, and lag by at least 50-100ms under the most ideal circumstances possible.
Now, if someone makes a case for the Galaxy S3 that works with an extended battery & gives it a nice slide-out gamepad that's at least as good as the one on a GBA, or a clamp that lets me attach my S3 to a PS3 or 360 controller (with extended battery and case attached) so I can use it as a second display, I might be interested...
A stock touchscreen phone (Android or otherwise) might be good enough for playing something lame like Farmville, or playing card games with people 2,000 miles away, but phones just don't have the controls they need to be real game controllers. Internet latency is just the fatality move that finishes it off once and for all.
I don't always use a controller, but when I do, I use a piece of flat glass.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=droidbean.btcontroller
BT Controller for Android, basically lets you set up a gamepad on your phone(you create or download the layout) by syncing two android based and bluetooth capable devices.
Not affiliated with it, though I have used it.
so to use a phone in my hands less than 2 foot away from my pc I now have to send that signal around the globe using the intertubes?
Rube Goldberg would cry if he saw todays world
Not quite true - phone vibration when you touch a control on the screen is the very definition of tactile feedback
But is it useful tactile feedback? Physical buttons have edges that the thumb's touch sensors feel in order to know where the thumb is positioned relative to the button so that the user can recenter the thumb over the button before actually pressing it. It's the same reason that your PC's keyboard has bumps on the F and J, so that a typist can identify the home row while looking at the display, and gaps between keys or beveled edges on the keys, so that the fingers can feel where one key ends and the next begins. A flat sheet of glass lacks this, and devices with key bumps powered by a Tactus touch screen (as seen in this article, this video, and this video) are still a year or two from mass production.
Many tablet/phone games already do this, mimicking "standard" console controls (for example, directional control on left, other buttons on right).
I have Nesoid, an NES emulator using such an on-screen gamepad, on my Nexus 7 tablet. Too often, in the heat of action, I end up pressing the wrong button or "whiffing" and pressing no button at all because my thumbs have drifted from where I expected them to be relative to the pictures of buttons.
Volume isn't reserved for the system. My e book app uses it to turn pages.
An application intended for quiet enjoyment, such as a paged document reader, can get away with that. An application with sound, such as a video game, not so much. When sound is playing, the user expects to have a volume control, not to have the volume up and down buttons remapped to jump and fire.
Playing instruments on iPad or iPhone that are being recorded as MIDI data on a Mac works great. Music has the same need for low latency as gaming controls. The only downside is you generally have to create an ad-hoc network between the devices so that you're not also running Internet over there or whatever other traffic may be on your proper Wi-Fi network.
Also iPads and iPhones running GarageBand can connect via Bluetooth so that you can play instruments on one and record on the other.
If they do it over then LAN (which they don't, but there's no reason why they shouldn't. maybe security limitations in the browser) they should get around 5 ms latency (ping). They don't need a round-trip, so it's half the ping time. If you can set TCP NODELAY with WebSockets, that should be achieveable with TCP. The problem is if there's a transmission error, you get retransmissions and delays. As each frame on the screen lasts for 16 ms at 60 Hz, the latency should be acceptable for most games
Oh, ok, my bad! Thanks for that clarification.
RR2 on OS X controlled via an iOS device, however, still requires both your mac and your phone/tablet to be on the same wifi network (source), very likely to handle the otherwise (relatively) high latency of an internet connection. This makes Google's work still relevant, given they're looking at users that may not be physically located together.
LegendMUD
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