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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
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.