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Xbox One Controller Cost Over $100 Million To Develop
mrspoonsi writes "The Xbox One controller went through many radical designs, including a built-in pico projector and a cartridge designed to release smell. Apparently, 'the core base didn't appreciate them,' so these wacky features were dropped in favor of a standard controller. According to VentureBeat, over $100 million worth of research went into the design they ended up using. 'Microsoft’s first tweaks for a new controller focused on the overall size and how it’d fit into hands, golden or otherwise. Using the Xbox 360 controller as a starting point, the engineers would make plastic-molded or 3D-printed prototypes that were each 1 millimeter wider or narrower than the last, testing a full range of up to plus or minus 8 millimeters. “That gave us the ability to test, with actual users including women and children, which width feels best,” said Morris. “We tested with more than 500 people throughout the course of the project. All ages, all abilities.” ... Morris and his team then looked at different thicknesses and shapes of the grips (or “lobes,” as he calls them), plus the angle of the triggers, different styles of analog sticks, and more.'"
Seriously? OVER a million? It's a nice controller, but really... Maybe this is one of the things wrong with Microsoft (and perhaps many big corps these days), they are not "nimble" and hevent been for at least 20 years. They have a lot to overcome if they want to remain "relevent", and Ballmer's departure is onle a very small part of that.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
And they still end up with a single one-size-fits-all controller. If they just made two controllers to fit more of the broad range of hand sizes, they'd be so much better off for it.
The researchers probably found there isn't just one controller - there were many, many good controllers, each for a different audience.
Why didn't they release multiple controllers, one for kids, one for adults? One for women, one for men? As Prego discovered, there isn't one spaghetti sauce that makes everyone happy; there are many, many sauces, all of which will make some people happy.
"over $100 million worth of research went into the design they ended up using"
Well, that's not quite true. Perhaps $100M went into designing and testing all the different prototypes they ultimately discarded, and the one they used... but the one that they finally decided upon only cost a fraction of that.
Apparently it cost SpaceX around $300 million to develop the Falcon 9 rocket. That is one expensive controller.
There's something really sad in looking at all those research groups who fail to get adequate funding for medical research or research to otherwise improve a person's life, and yet a company is able to waste $100 million developing a single component for a fucking GAMING CONSOLE of all things.
Microsoft isn't a Government department and they can do what they like, but it's just so damn disproportionate the amount of money that goes into research in terms of long-term importance. People are dying because there's not enough research to treat various diseases, but fuck that, the angle permutations of a life-wasting device must be calculated precisely, gimme more money. OK, thanks. Fuck this planet.
As someone with an overly sensitive nose. who once worked retail. you people reak. yes. even you. all of you.
I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Even though you can whip together a simple controller for $10 (including labor) from a few switches and bits of wire, doesn't mean that you've accomplished the same thing as Microsoft.
On the technical end, you're dealing with a fair bit of electronics and software to support everything from reading a button's state to streaming audio from the console. On top of that, they have to consider factors such as ergonomics and marketing. For a company like Microsoft with competitors like Nintendo and Sony, it is best to do their homework first even if it ends up costing a lot more.
One thing I thought was interesting about the WiiMote was that it was one of the only (probably the only popular one) controller which was ambidextrous.
Interesting point. It was physically ambidextrous in the sense that it was symmetrical, but it was far from ambidextrous.
Any game that required you to hold it like a gamepad presumed it would be the same orientation, (ie like an NES gamepad). To reprogrammit to work the 'other way' would require both the buttons to be swapped and the d-pad inverted. I don't think many (if any) titles supported that.
And when held like a remote, it was more ambidextrous than most games, but often the game needed to be designed for lefties, or allow for it.
Wii Sports for example let you set left and right handed use, for each sport individually. (Kudos to Nintendo there; I do most of the sports left handed, but I golf right handed (and not especially well) due to having grown up in a house with only right handed clubs.)
But many of the 3rd party mini-games & party games did not allow for left handed use. Usually things were fine, but there'd always be one or two spots where it would go all wrong.
The one that leaps to mind was a frisbee toss minigame in one of the titles we had.
The game was expecting a left to right-up flick. So attempting it left handed was a right to left flick, and it went all wrong. Most of the time it didn't even recognize the flick at all, would react half-assed before or after the actual flick. You could hold it upside down, but that was still botched because down was now up. And it would react like you just threw it into the ground.
I just switched to doing it right handed. Kind of annoying really.
For what its worth as background, as a lefty I liked the xbox 360 controller (don't have an xbox, but have a controller paired with my PC); and I liked the wii-u classic controller. I FPS with my right hand on WASD, and my left on the mouse. The mouse I'm currently using is a razer deathadder left handed model, with the buttons programmed so that the left mouse button is on the left. (I like the left mouse for the ergo comfort, but after years of using RH mice, my middle finger is my 'left click', and my index finger is 'right'. (The fact that Razer defaults them 'backwards' drives me nuts, as after a reboot, the buttons are backwards until the razer programmability software is loaded, which is retarded.)
I also tried switching them in the windows mouse control panel, but that had all kinds of side effects... they were right on my desktop, but backwards when I RDP into another unit... which was far more annoying than the couple seconds of stupid at startup.
If Razer is reading this, save which button is left and right right on the mouse itself. But I'm well and off on a tangent now. :)
Left-handed writer, right-hand mouse, right-hand scissors, left-hand golfer and... left-handed Wiimote user. It didn't really occur to me that anything was particularly unusual until I was playing one of those dance games that uses the Remote+Nunchuck and I kept failing everything because I was holding them in the "opposite" hand. (Thankfully, a lot of games will either auto-calibrate for that, or have control settings to pick. This one... didn't.)
here's why you can know I am not making up my credentials...I really have done the work I claim
there are volumes of research that have already been done about *buttons* however you want to define the concept
also, why research *where* to put a button with that funciton? you should **let the user have the option** to have the button or where to locate it! as for where to put the button by default, by necessity it has to be on the edge somewhere, after that, since almost all languages read from right to left, virtually all users (except those that read hebrew as their primary language) would **expect** to see the 'start' button on the **left side of the screen**
You absolutely do not need to do anything more than a **simple literature review** and apply some basic technical design theory...that's to arrive at 'either top or bottom of left edge'
so that's two fairly similar options...from there let the design team decide!!!
*and of course let the user have the option to change the location at will or remove completely*
back to your question about 'buttons'......Ben Shneiderman's work is industry-standard here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman
Here's a link his University page: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/
I'm not claiming Shneiderman is the magic bullet to all design questions, or that his design conceptualizations are fundamental to the industry...he made significant positive contributions...but his concepts are too linguistic-based 'make X more visible' sometimes & marketing people just have their way with it...
One of Shneiderman's major contributions, starting in the early 1980s, was formalizing a way to academically analyze all the research in computing across disciplines about things like 'how to design a good button'
Designing the User Interface is a current text written by him that is used in 100s of universities nationwide & globally. (btw don't pick him apart to me...i have my quibbles...) He ends up with very linguistic-based heuristics mostly, but if you combine his ideas with more formal language from true cyberneticists like Claude Shannon and Norbert Weiner then you can get some highly quantifiable data...
But regardless...Shneiderman's concepts are industry standard...how they are applied in the lab...well that's up to the researcher!
All of what M$ did with their 'Start' button was covered by Shneiderman in the 80s & continued to refine iteritively since then...
Thank you Dave Raggett
Here is a list of Shneiderman's 8 Golden Rules for anyone who might be interested. It's has been typically used as an introductory 'U/X' concept for years (me personally I introduce. the Law of Cybernetics first).
They've been restated many times since the 80s. From the source(http://faculty.washington.edu/jtenenbg/courses/360/f04/sessions/schneidermanGoldenRules.html)
These rules were obtained from the text Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman.
To improve the usability of an application it is important to have a well designed interface. Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design" are a guide to good interaction design.
1 Strive for consistency.
Consistent sequences of actions should be required in similar situations; identical terminology should be used in prompts, menus, and help screens; and consistent commands should be employed throughout.
2 Enable frequent users to use shortcuts.
As the frequency of use increases, so do the user's desires to reduce the number of interactions and to increase the pace of interaction. Abbreviations, function keys, hidden commands, and macro facilities are very helpful to an expert user.
3 Offer informative feedback.
For every operator action, there should be some system feedback. For frequent and minor actions, the response can be modest, while for infrequent and major actions, the response should be more substantial.
4 Design dialog to yield closure.
Sequences of actions should be organized into groups with a beginning, middle, and end. The informative feedback at the completion of a group of actions gives the operators the satisfaction of accomplishment, a sense of relief, the signal to drop contingency plans and options from their minds, and an indication that the way is clear to prepare for the next group of actions.
5 Offer simple error handling.
As much as possible, design the system so the user cannot make a serious error. If an error is made, the system should be able to detect the error and offer simple, comprehensible mechanisms for handling the error.
6 Permit easy reversal of actions.
This feature relieves anxiety, since the user knows that errors can be undone; it thus encourages exploration of unfamiliar options. The units of reversibility may be a single action, a data entry, or a complete group of actions.
7 Support internal locus of control.
Experienced operators strongly desire the sense that they are in charge of the system and that the system responds to their actions. Design the system to make users the initiators of actions rather than the responders.
8 Reduce short-term memory load.
The limitation of human information processing in short-term memory requires that displays be kept simple, multiple page displays be consolidated, window-motion frequency be reduced, and sufficient training time be allotted for codes, mnemonics, and sequences of actions.
Thank you Dave Raggett