Slashdot Mirror
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.
This was an entertaining game dominated by the defenses of two really good football teams. I'm sorry that you dorks are incapable of appreciating that most people aren't enterained by World of Warcraft or stupid TV shows about space travel 300 years in the future.
And yet the game was still far more worthwhile than all 700+ bullshit Star Track episodes.
I just wanted to say that Maroon 5 sucked live, even though I like all the songs they played. Other than the eye candy for the ladies, it was one of the most forgettable halftimes in memory.
Just another day in Paradise
The best commercial was the mountain killing the bud knight.
The worst ad was the lumpy milk ad. Nobody wanted to eat snacks after that. The co's with food ads should sue them.
Table-ized A.I.
At least 3 co's featured robots or androids (lower-case) in their ads. The child-bot was featured twice, and creepy both times. Hawking insurance I think.
Another bot ad was a big cellphone telecom, I forgot which; and a 3rd was somebody worried about a robot taking his job during a bad dream. I think it was hawking a home security system. It had a dumb catch-line along the lines of: "You have enough worries outside, at least make your home secure."
Table-ized A.I.
This is not correct, highlights a very minority opinion, and belongs on the toilet paper of some insufferable blogger's tackily decorated rental mobile home.
"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."
Once the jock-sniffers become cripples they will need something to do ...
Two franchises I really dislike held no interest for me. The owner of the Rams is a disgusting shithead who thinks the world owes him money and I'm sick to death of Tom Brady and the entire Patriots Nation If it had been the Texans or the Bears or any one of a dozen other teams, I might have tuned in, but nah.
Instead, I watched 2 episodes of Punisher Season 2 and then THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE, which is a motherfucker of a movie. Highly recommended.
Two movies you gotta watch are MANDY (on the Shudder Network) and THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE.
If you're a Prime Member, you can watch MANDY for free, but you have to subscribe to the Shudder Network via Amazon Prime for a free trial and then you can cancel immediately after the movie if you want. But do try to see MANDY. It's Nicolas Cage's finest role and the most psychedelic horror movie I've seen in ages.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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?
Star Wars peaked early, specifically in that episode where Picard used the Tardis to help Frodo escape from the Cylons so he could save Princess Leia from Thanos.
Was that the William Shatner ST universe, or the Chris Pine ST universe?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Super Bowl 53 has come and gone and, for me at least, there was one clear highlight. This Microsoft commercial.
I guess the game of Handegg was pretty uninspiring then.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
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.
It's an interesting technology, It's also somewhat deceitful. Gross motor control with shoulders and leg muscles, instead of finger muscles, cannot be expected to be as fast and delicately controlled as finger movements. I'm delighted that these children, and adults, can play: I'd not expect it to work well for the various "button mashers" or twitch driven 8 button combo combat games.
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.
I liked Budweiser's commercial best. It gave me a little hope that humanity isn't going to completely screw itself over.
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
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Not necessarily. A lot of companies will develop these sorts of technologies even if the market isn't there because it gives them good press. Then they run it up the flagpole, helping them shed bad PR, such as appearing like an unfeeling, monopolistic behemoth.
Also, in these cases of altruism, whenever anyone claims that so-and-so company is just money-grabbing and not altruistic, I ask whether they would be able to identify when a company actually is being altruistic. Some companies do good things because they're not completely evil (I work for one).
Dude, go play fortnight or what ever the game of the week is and there is probably a bunch of kids using this thing to totally own your ass.
Evil Micro$oft making their products available for children with disabilities, the nerve!!
This is Slashdot, Microsoft can never do the right thing!
I only dabble but I've found that some simple filters can help. For example, real PacMan machines use a joystick with a 4 way gate on it, that is the stick physically can't be moved into the diagonal positions. It's up, down, left and right only.
Such things are fairly uncommon for computers and games consoles. I build an adaptor for a friend to use an old Amiga joystick on his PC, but he found that PacMan on MAME didn't play very well. I fixed it by making the adaptor ignore diagonals. Trickier than it sounds, because the stick can still move to the corners, but I found that if it always switches to the "new" direction and and ignores the old (e.g. right to up/right corner produces up only) it felt natural.
PacMan is ideal for this kind of thing because although it has some "twitch" elements, you can actually buffer inputs heavily, e.g. you can push to take a corner long before you reach the corner and the game will be fine with it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The Star Trek Franchise died years ago. Just no one realized it yet. I would say Insurrection Stopped it, and Nemesis failed the rebound.
The JJ Trek, was the attempt to finish off the game.
With the dead franchise, CBS needed to keep its copyright, so they made Discovery out of their asses, as a hope there would be enough Star Trek fans, gullible enough to buy CBS all access.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The key rule for Science Fiction is that you should only break one law of physics.
Star Trek kinda merged all the Science fiction tropes together, this wasn't that big of deal, until people started to put the Star Trek Universe connected into so sort of Canonical set of events.
Oddly enough until Deep Space 9, with its over reaching story arc. Star Trek didn't worry too much about canon. They would do a temporary solving of the problem at hand, then run off to a new place not worrying about the consequences of their actions, and never looking back. So sure they can travel in time in one episode, and the next episode say it is impossible, and if the writers were very clever, they would give a tech-tech explanation on why it doesn't work this time (something about quantum).
But with DS9, the remaining seasons of TNG, and Voyager, and Enterprise. Everything needed to start to fit together somehow. This which worked for DS9, hurt the other shows.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How are sports fans any different then other Nerd culture events?
Strong opinions on things that do not affect them... Check
Wear funny costumes... Check
Trying to explain away or recon events that they didn't expect... Check
Spend a lot of time, trying to play out different scenarios of their selected group... Check
Sports Fans are just as much Nerds as the rest of us.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The best thing about the Super Bowl was the Bud Light/Game of Thrones crossover ad.
Wow.
This is Slashdot, man. You gotta know your science fiction better than that.
It peaked when Buck Rogers stole the Galactica to save the Minbari from Battlefield Earth.
Picard was like, three years later.
The kid should have been shown killing someone at in Fortnite and then a cut screen of Ninja screaming hacker. It's not like he was afraid to cash in do silly cameos.
The most recent ST movie was actually OK. Felt like a long episode of a real ST TV show, which made it head and shoulders above the last 6 or so movies.
But yeah, ST, like SW, is dead until the culture wars are behind us. And maybe forever - nothing stopping a new franchise from being good. The Expanse shows there's still some creativity left in the world.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You mean American hand egg? Football is played with feet and without a bunch of gear on.
Hundreds of games with different rules have been played with feet and balls over the centuries. The particular rules set that's popular today was called "soccer" at the English school where it was invented. Of all the kinds of football, the kind called "soccer" is the most popular.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Admittedly I found this moving too. I love seeing how video games touch the lives of so many people and in so many ways these days. I've been around since the beginning and video games have been a part of my life since the days of Pac-Man and Space Invaders. I've become what I am today in many ways because of them including a career that has helped to provide for my family and put a roof over head and food in our mouths. MS scored some points with me when I saw this... and I loved seeing how enthusiastic that little boy was about games in general too!
It used to be able to control my whole xbox, the tv, netflix, hulu etc. Now it can barely pause the DVR. They talk about accessibility, but they kill off their voice controls almost completely.
An ad played during a jock-sniffing contest is now news for nerds?
My kingdom for a way of giving wedgies online.
Star Trek predicted the Irish unification of 2024.
And that starships would have ashtrays.
It's a really good controller hub device, it doesn't solve the outrageous cost of large clickable buttons or mouth-sticks, but it's definitely well thought out with more expansion than you'll probably need.
See:
In the lab with Xbox's new Adaptive Controller, and
Xbox Adaptive Controller is now out -- and we go hand, foot, fingers, and elbows-on
That's what I really love about The Wrath of Khan. When he started working on that movie, Nicholas Meyer went back and watched the entire run of TOS. And one of the things that struck him was how, in those completely self-contained episodes, Kirk and crew were always able to cheat death with no real consequences, and no decisions from any previous episodes ever came back to bite them in the ass (or were ever even mentioned again). So he set about creating the ultimate critique of that, a movie where Kirk's propensity to just move on and seemingly completely forget about his past decisions (and obligations) came back to bite him hard--a movie in which Kirk finally faced real consequences that he couldn't just last-minute cheat his way out of. A lot of people miss that essential element of STII completely, and think of it as just an exciting revenge story. But there is a lot more depth to that movie than most (even most Trek fans) appreciate.
Of course, STIII (cursed be its name) completely undid all those important consequences in STII. And that was truly tragic, IMHO. But that was Paramount's fault there.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Who are "they"? The real point of this controller is that it is a first-party controller with 1/8" jacks for everything. That separates the common part of a controller from the plethora of different controllers needed for a variety of disabilities. This means that the guts of the controller interface don't need to be duplicated in every specific unique custom controller, which are usually quite pricey because of low volume. $100 is cheap for something designed to have shit plugged into it. Also, if there is any kind of DRM in the controller (extra controllers are a lucrative market for console manufacturers, encouraging making them hard to replicate without a license), custom controllers become more difficult and expensive, often requiring a gutted retail controller be wedged in somewhere.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }