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Microsoft's Moving Xbox Ad Was the Best Thing About the Super Bowl (cnet.com)
Mark Serrels, writing for CNET: Super Bowl 53 has come and gone and, for me at least, there was one clear highlight. This Microsoft commercial. [...] Essentially a commercial for Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controller, this ad follows up on an earlier ad from the Christmas period, which highlights young kids with limited mobility playing video games. It's incredible.
It tells the story of kids with limited mobility and their love for video games. All kids love video games and if you're a person with limited mobility, video games can often provide a pathway to experiences that are often difficult in the real world. But in some cases, particular types of limited mobility can make even the games themselves difficult to play -- which is where the Xbox Adaptive Controller comes in. Further reading: Xbox wire; and Why Xbox spent a year designing the Adaptive Controller packaging.
It tells the story of kids with limited mobility and their love for video games. All kids love video games and if you're a person with limited mobility, video games can often provide a pathway to experiences that are often difficult in the real world. But in some cases, particular types of limited mobility can make even the games themselves difficult to play -- which is where the Xbox Adaptive Controller comes in. Further reading: Xbox wire; and Why Xbox spent a year designing the Adaptive Controller packaging.
Agreed, it's not often you get to see a good defensive battle anymore.
Just another day in Paradise
"Idiots" and "a bunch of muscle-heads fight over a ball..."
... leads all other sports in the number of injuries sustained. Quoting:
Football
"In 2007, more than 920,000 athletes under the age of 18 were treated in emergency rooms, doctors' offices, and clinics for football-related injuries, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission."
I'll be blunt: I know literally nothing about the controller.
What I do know, and what I hoped to express in my previous post, is that it is beyond ridiculous to criticize a company that has done something so wonderful because they didn't do it earlier, as the OP did.
My goal wasn't to trivialize Microsoft's work on this controller, but to call out the reductionist logic expressed by the OP. I applaud MS for doing this work, and I consider it a serious achievement in gaming accessibility regardless of how easy or difficult it was as an engineering project.
I'm fine with it. by this time and age I am quite capable of telling a slashdot ad article by myself, and I trained myself to ignore ads in many forms where I can't turn them off. I come here for the comments sections as well as I'm sure many others also do anyways, so if a Microsoft product story sparks some insightful conversation - sure why not?
The controller, I mean?
Since I've been creating input devices for people who cannot use "normal" ones for one reason or another for many years now, I'm curious. How close are they to actually providing an interface that offers a comparable accessibility to people with reduced mobility or fine motor skills? What sorts of input do they already provide?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd expect to see one at a GameStation near you pretty soon. I'd be very curious to hear about your work. How, for example, do you deal with the "smoothing" problem? With differentiating between small muscle or neurological impulses and the significant signal that people actually want action for, as quickly as possible, without waiting too long to accumulate a valid signal? I'm looking at https://www.sciencedirect.com/..., which gives a good detailed analysis of the problem. The necessary delay to accumulate a reliable signal is roughly 200 milliseconds. That is fairly slow for a reactive "twitch" combat game.
Is it comparable to the delay of electro-mechanical devices you've used? I'm quite curious if you've seen limits to response time with your techniques, or to hear what basic mechanical or electrical designs you use. With some luck, if they're continuing with this project, perhaps they would provide some funding or consulting work for children their design does not quite work for.
They're really nice: The controller base looks and feels very solidly built. The stand-out bits are that it has USB, so you can plug in some existing devices, but more importantly every button and trigger has a 3.5mm plug associated with it, so that you can attach any custom pedal/button/switch/lever/etc for which you can hack in a 3.5mm jack.
This is good for games, but it's also good as the core for other types of customized input arrangements.
~D
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