"'I'm very, very good at writing protocols. I've accomplished more working on my own than I ever did as part of a team.' While we're having lunch, his wife, Jenna, tells me about the time they were watching Amadeus, where Mozart writes his music so rapidly and perfectly it appears to have been dictated by God. Cohen decided he was kind of like that. Like Mozart? Bram and Jenna nod."
Already I've noticed a climate shift starting in my area (Michigan)... we're returning to the type of winters we had 30 or 40 years ago, which had a lot more snow and cold weather then the winters we saw in the 90's, which typically had one hell of a snow-storm... but only that one, with temperatures reaching into the 50s sometimes in mid-December.
Um...No? I've heard several people talk about how harsh this winter (and last) was and it wasn't. Take a look at the historical data and it wasn't anything out of the ordinary, really. Just ebbs and flows in the mins and maxes. Take a look at this:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/res40.pl?page=c li mvisghcnv2.html
I should qualify that with a "however". I'm talking about the 20th century, so we could have global warming due to humans that is bad that was started with the industrial age, and looking at the past 50 years for strange trends won't help since the trends started long before that.
I already have a TGA reader that doesn't do quite the same thing as the essay's reader, but probably comparable. It reads the various headers, makes sure the tga file is the type I like (32 bit the last byte being alpha), reads it in, steps through all the bytes and swaps the red and blue bytes (tga is bgra, I want rgba, if I remember correctly). The code uses C++, does no optimization other than what.net 2003 pro does in standard "release" build, and was written by me in an afternoon a few years back. It has performed flawlessly since written.
Profiling under WinXP on an Athlon, reading in a complex image (not that it matters) the same size as that in the essay (576x576) although with an extra byte of alpha, I get:
1,226 microseconds
-or-
0.001226 seconds
-or-
816 images/second
So basically 12x speed improvement on a processor roughly 2/3rd the speed. Remember, I did no optimization iterations. Wrote it, ran it, debugged it, put it in CVS for everyone to use the past 5+ years. Also remember that I'm not doing the same thing, but it seems to me that RLE would be faster than what I'm doing, since I need to read and write every byte of the image.
Now, having said that, I agree with the essay in principle. Choose the right algorithms to start with, choose different algorithms if needed, and optimize hot spots when profiling shows a problem. I am a gaming/simulation/graphics programmer by trade and I am amused when someone worries about a 100 iteration loop that has some trig functions in it that runs every time the user pops open a certain dialog box. The massive amounts of processing that goes on in graphics/simulation inner loops has given me a profound understanding of the power of a modern machine, such that I don't sweat the small stuff. However, it has also given me a profound appreciation for the concept of O() notation. O(2^n) will cripple any machine for any software. Except, of course, when n is small. With small n, who gives a crap about the inside of the O() - care about the unspoken constant in front of it!
Everyone that gets near game development (or even thinks about it for a few minutes) comes up with this idea, and it has never been really feasible. At least for AAA titles. "Game Development Environments" have been around since at least the 80's, and while some game are created with them, the simple fact is that if you can make a game with a generic construction system, I can make a custom job that is a bit faster, a bit better looking, and a bit more fun, and then I win. Having said that, I encourage people to keep flinging themselves at that wall, it may crack someday and that would be tres cool. It's just not going to be me!
Ah, that explains why we all have PCs that look like iMacs and iLamps on our desk. Apple every once in a while comes up with a good idea, then spends the next decade swaggering around until it realizes the PC industry has left it in the dust.
I have Dell's (meager) 16" widescreen and it trounces all over our artist's 17" Apple. He was all proud at first until he played with my Dell, now he wants back in PC land.
Actually, the engine, although definitely one of the most technically complex parts, is no longer the "hardest" part. The core engine can still be designed by a small team ( 5, easily, 3 or less if they're really good, a la Carmack), and even in that, the core graphics is pretty much done by one person even on today's game. All the tools for the artist, level designers, and such, take up significantly more programmer time than the engine. And that is dwarfed by the content creation that artists and designers go through. I'd say the hardest part is actually making a fun, interesting game, while still maintaining a shiny patina of graphical goodness.
Go create a single, high-poly, production-level model, including a bunch of animations, and then multiply by about 10,000 and you'll get a feel for the effort involved.
And while I'm sure he was in on the design process, its not like Carmack sat around doing everything himself, surrounded by a chorus of yes-men-and-women, cheering him on. I'm pretty sure most everything outside of the graphics is done by others, please correct me if I'm wrong. Take a look at Armadillo Aerospace, and you'll see where he's been spending his time (and money, yikes!).
And as for needing to sell a copy to every computer user, at an inflated price - do the math and you'll see that's a bit off. Say, $100, and 100 million computers in the country, which makes for a nice cool $10 billion if my maths (as the brits say) are correct. Its a moot point anyway, I'm sure the Duke Nukem' group have made so much cash off the old franchise, that its pretty much a rich-person's hobby at this point.
Hell, I'll be incredibly impressed if they do get a good-quality game out the door any time in the next decade. Give me $50 million or so, and I don't think I'd ever get anything done again, especially not something as demanding and intense as game development.
I'd just get stuck at the stripper motion capture sessions the press has mentioned;)
I have the worst posture, and do everything "wrong" when it comes to RSI, and have almost never suffered from it. The only time I did is when I decided it would be a good idea to try assuming a "correct" posture. My wrist and hands started hurting within a week.
I'm constantly shifting around in my seat, changing postures, and therefore the angles of my hands/wrists. The big thing for me is that if it starts hurting, or feeling uncomfortable, shift around until I find the pressure is relieved. If nothing's working, take a break and stretch out my wrists, arms, and fingers. Half the RSI sufferers I know seem to get into this masochistic mode where they just keep typing away even when things start hurting.
C'mon people, if it hurts try doing something a little different. Don't just rigidly sit in the same posture trying to work through it. Move around a little!
Jack Wagner writes: It's generally known that studies have shown that teams of four can develop code one order of magnitude faster than 4 coders working separately and my experience backs that up.
Really? Have any links to real studies to point this out? Did you get the information from a friend of a friend, too?
Sorry, my experience does not agree with you. A great team of four can *maybe* be faster than four on their own, but certainly not 10x the speed.
Extreme Programming has some interesting points, some of which I have taken to heart, but in general its just a way to sell books and consulting services. I was consulting for Chrysler while Kent Beck (the "father" of extreme programming) was working on the C3 project (the foundational project for extreme programming), and the project was not exactly the success story its made to be.
Like I said, some good ideas, but it isn't worth the religious status people have given it.
"Envy". This was (is?) a code management tool for Smalltalk development. Not only did it have the basic checkin/checkout/diff features of normal tools, it also took into account all the areas of "friction" in team development and attempted to reduce the coefficient of friction, as such. Some examples:
Scratch pad versions. Ever needed to play around
with a piece of code (put in debug statements,
or change part of it temporarily to help debug
something) but didn't want to check it out
and have the threat of making the changes
accidentally permanent? Envy had the ability
to make a "scratch" version of a file - letting
you edit it, but not worry about accidental
check ins, or forgetting that you had made a
file writeable.
Version/Releases. Not only could you label
a specific state of an application a "version"
but you could also label a version of an
app a "release". This allowed some subtle
distinctions between "ok here's a workable
version we can get back to (demo)" and "here's
the real, outgoing released version".
Manager. Code could be given specific people
that were the manager, or "owner" of a piece
of code. If you wanted to enter your changes
into the code base in general, you had to get
the owner to do it. This control could be
anywhere from every check-in, to version or
releases. An owner could give permissions to
other people as well.
Multiple checkouts. Envy recognized that
sometimes people have to work on the same
file, as much as its best prevented. So,
it allowed multiple check-outs, with facilities
to integrated the files back together on
check-in.
It was quite complex, but looking back at it I
now understand why many of the facilities were
there and die to have them for my team. We're
using SourceSafe (blech), and it works ok, but
something like Envy would be great.
Other factors
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
- there needs to be a country named "USA" - there needs to be a state named "Michigan" - there needs to be a city named "Grand Rapids" - there needs to be a woman named "Jackie" that
is of Norwegian heritage - there needs to be a man named "Don" that is of
extremely mixed heritage - they have to meet and marry - they have to have two previous children, one
5 1/2 years old and female, one 8 years old and
male - and then they have to all to take a trip to
a place called "Florida", with its especially
fertile air. - "grandparents" must live in this place, and
these beings must take care of the aforementioned "kids" for an evening. - both "Jackie" and "Don" must be in the mood.
and *then* you get me.
Since this is obviously amazing unlikely to ever occur again, I have therefore proved that no one in the world exists but me.
We've been doing optical gesture recognition tech for several years now. Funded by various grants from various organizations, we have one product (Use Your Head) that uses a normal USB camera (only on Windows though, sorry) and turns a person head motions into keystrokes. The intent of that product is to turn the normal head-bobbing and weaving seen by people playing FPSs into actual movements. It uses < 5% CPU and is completely customizable including sensitivity.
Cybernet Systems Corp makes a similar system, except it tracks your head (side-to-side, up-and-down movements) without the need for a dot on your forehead. Uses a normal webcam (windows
only, sorry). So its nice and cheap.
Visit the web site for more info about how this can be used in a game. (Eye tracking doesn't work at all in an action game, but shifting your head side to side does).
Ron Hay
Turing Machinist
Cybernet Systems Corp
Current project: Edge of Extinction -- free massive-multiplayer game. Release in a couple of days.
Actually, the article simply paraphrases a talk he gave at Game Developers 2000. The talk was much more in-depth and much more technical. It was one of the more interesting talks last year, although it was more of a "here's my life experience" talk than "here's algorithm X" talk. The reason it is salient is that Abrash has *been* there - Joe Schmoe hasn't. Plus Abrash is an excellent writer, and fun speaker.
The game of life that is the title of the second page is part of the talk that he gave (but not included in the article) where he speaks on optimizing the Game of Life. He starts out with being able to get ~3 generations a second, and after some interesting ideas, ends up at 200+ generations a second.
Taken by itself, the article is a tad fluffy, though.
I switched from a TNT2 card to a G400 card once. I've never had so many problems with a card in my life. I ended up having to rebuild the entire system, just to switch back to my TNT2 card. The thing I have to say about Matrox is that they have very *responsive* tech support. The responded quickly to my questions with many different patches and drivers and bios upgrades. None of them worked right, so I wouldn't say tech support was effective.
The best out there is Nvidia, really. Great cards, great drivers.
Actually, UseYourHead doesn't have a problem with low-light (a completely dark room won't work) or even low-contrast situations. It works fine with different colored skin tones as well. It takes up less than 5% on a mid range (500 mhz athlon/p3) system, and actually is capable of more than simple, 2-D translation. I'm not sure of the exact specs, but if you are interested, email us and we can give you a better idea of how it works.
Ron Hay
rhay@cybernet.com
Developer/Designer
Cybernet Systems Corp
> I'm waiting for the NES PowerGlove to make it's way onto the PC.
Actually, Cybernet is helping
Essential Reality do just that. They made the original one, and we're helping them make the current incarnation which is a much more sophisticated USB device. Supposedly it comes out sometime this year, and the harried look on our Lead Engineer for the project leads me to believe they'll probably meet that deadline...
Ron Hay
rhay@cybernet.com
Game Designer/Developer
Cybernet Systems Corp.
Coming from inside Cybernet, I have a bit more info on the product for those that are interested.
First, the product uses very little CPU (less than 5%) and given that it runs off of normal webcams (which typically have a framerate of less than 30fps) has little
lag.
Second, the product is purely "optical" - you don't have to attach dots or sensors or anything to your head.
Third, the device isn't meant to replace the keyboard/mouse/joystick (I pounded mightily on the
UseYourHead group in the beginning that gamers - specially FPS gamers - will never want to go away from their controller of choice) - but it basically gives you an unobtrusive tertiary device.
Fourth, it moves by tracking translational movement (left, right, up, down) not rotational movement of your head (twisting). It was obvious from the start that a device requiring you to take your eyes off the screen was a bad idea.
Finally, a bit more information about the tech. UseYourHead runs off of Cybernet's Gesture Technology which was developed on various Military R&D contracts and is capable of identifying complex gestures, where a "gesture" can be a series of positions by anything from your hand to your head or even your feet or something held in your hand. Think of slapping a camera on your TV and never having to search for your remote again because you can wave the channels up or down, or use simple signals to specify a channel.
UseYourHead is the first foray into commercial-land for this technology. We wanted something simple, something basic, something useful. Originally intended almost entirely for the first person shooter market, we recognized the basic motions most people make when playing those game is to weave, duck, and try to peer around corners, over ledges, ie. head tracking. Head tracking is *really* simple for the gesture tech, the hard part was getting it to work as fast as possible with the relatively slow web cams.
As a first pass, UseYourHead takes head movements and lets you map them to keystrokes. Its the simplest setup that allows UseYourHead to work well with almost all existing games. However, game developers can directly integrate support for UseYourHead (through a DirectInput wrapper) and have a more continous motion. Imagine your screen as a window into the virtual world, and as you try to peer around a corner, the game smoothly shifts to give you the correct perspective. Even more interesting, game developers can use our tech to access more complicated gestures. For instance, the game Black & White has a system for casting spells in it that requires you to make gestures with your mouse, imagine being able to use your hand directly to make those gestures (Somatic components from D&D:)
Oh, and while UseYourHead is meant for Windows, all the original tech runs on various versions of Unix (Cybernet puts out a Linux product called Netmax as well)
Feel free to email me if you have any questions,
or visit Cybernet's web site for more company
info)
Ron Hay
rhay@cybernet.com
Game Designer/Developer
Cybernet Systems Corp
Slashdot Mirror
Why can I not have moderation points at a time like this to help others see the genius in your statements?
... "Fuck Paul Graham with a red hot fork".
Although, I would have stated your post more like
I think your way is a bit more diplomatic though.
He's "understated"?
"'I'm very, very good at writing protocols. I've accomplished more working on my own than I ever did as part of a team.' While we're having lunch, his wife, Jenna, tells me about the time they were watching Amadeus, where Mozart writes his music so rapidly and perfectly it appears to have been dictated by God. Cohen decided he was kind of like that. Like Mozart? Bram and Jenna nod."
Already I've noticed a climate shift starting in my area (Michigan)... we're returning to the type of winters we had 30 or 40 years ago, which had a lot more snow and cold weather then the winters we saw in the 90's, which typically had one hell of a snow-storm... but only that one, with temperatures reaching into the 50s sometimes in mid-December.
c li mvisghcnv2.html
Um...No? I've heard several people talk about how harsh this winter (and last) was and it wasn't. Take a look at the historical data and it wasn't anything out of the ordinary, really. Just ebbs and flows in the mins and maxes. Take a look at this:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/res40.pl?page=
I should qualify that with a "however". I'm talking about the 20th century, so we could have global warming due to humans that is bad that was started with the industrial age, and looking at the past 50 years for strange trends won't help since the trends started long before that.
I already have a TGA reader that doesn't do quite the same thing as the essay's reader, but probably comparable. It reads the various headers, makes sure the tga file is the type I like (32 bit the last byte being alpha), reads it in, steps through all the bytes and swaps the red and blue bytes (tga is bgra, I want rgba, if I remember correctly). The code uses C++, does no optimization other than what .net 2003 pro does in standard "release" build, and was written by me in an afternoon a few years back. It has performed flawlessly since written.
Profiling under WinXP on an Athlon, reading in a complex image (not that it matters) the same size as that in the essay (576x576) although with an extra byte of alpha, I get:
1,226 microseconds
-or-
0.001226 seconds
-or-
816 images/second
So basically 12x speed improvement on a processor roughly 2/3rd the speed. Remember, I did no optimization iterations. Wrote it, ran it, debugged it, put it in CVS for everyone to use the past 5+ years. Also remember that I'm not doing the same thing, but it seems to me that RLE would be faster than what I'm doing, since I need to read and write every byte of the image.
Now, having said that, I agree with the essay in principle. Choose the right algorithms to start with, choose different algorithms if needed, and optimize hot spots when profiling shows a problem. I am a gaming/simulation/graphics programmer by trade and I am amused when someone worries about a 100 iteration loop that has some trig functions in it that runs every time the user pops open a certain dialog box. The massive amounts of processing that goes on in graphics/simulation inner loops has given me a profound understanding of the power of a modern machine, such that I don't sweat the small stuff. However, it has also given me a profound appreciation for the concept of O() notation. O(2^n) will cripple any machine for any software. Except, of course, when n is small. With small n, who gives a crap about the inside of the O() - care about the unspoken constant in front of it!
Everyone that gets near game development (or even thinks about it for a few minutes) comes up with this idea, and it has never been really feasible. At least for AAA titles. "Game Development Environments" have been around since at least the 80's, and while some game are created with them, the simple fact is that if you can make a game with a generic construction system, I can make a custom job that is a bit faster, a bit better looking, and a bit more fun, and then I win. Having said that, I encourage people to keep flinging themselves at that wall, it may crack someday and that would be tres cool. It's just not going to be me!
The hammer has been found to be a better tool that a screwdriver, while the saw fell somewhere in the middle.
I personally always use a hammer...
Apple inovates, everyone else imitates.
Ah, that explains why we all have PCs that look like iMacs and iLamps on our desk. Apple every once in a while comes up with a good idea, then spends the next decade swaggering around until it realizes the PC industry has left it in the dust.
I have Dell's (meager) 16" widescreen and it trounces all over our artist's 17" Apple. He was all proud at first until he played with my Dell, now he wants back in PC land.
Actually, the engine, although definitely one of the most technically complex parts, is no longer the "hardest" part. The core engine can still be designed by a small team ( 5, easily, 3 or less if they're really good, a la Carmack), and even in that, the core graphics is pretty much done by one person even on today's game. All the tools for the artist, level designers, and such, take up significantly more programmer time than the engine. And that is dwarfed by the content creation that artists and designers go through. I'd say the hardest part is actually making a fun, interesting game, while still maintaining a shiny patina of graphical goodness.
;)
Go create a single, high-poly, production-level model, including a bunch of animations, and then multiply by about 10,000 and you'll get a feel for the effort involved.
And while I'm sure he was in on the design process, its not like Carmack sat around doing everything himself, surrounded by a chorus of yes-men-and-women, cheering him on. I'm pretty sure most everything outside of the graphics is done by others, please correct me if I'm wrong. Take a look at Armadillo Aerospace, and you'll see where he's been spending his time (and money, yikes!).
And as for needing to sell a copy to every computer user, at an inflated price - do the math and you'll see that's a bit off. Say, $100, and 100 million computers in the country, which makes for a nice cool $10 billion if my maths (as the brits say) are correct. Its a moot point anyway, I'm sure the Duke Nukem' group have made so much cash off the old franchise, that its pretty much a rich-person's hobby at this point.
Hell, I'll be incredibly impressed if they do get a good-quality game out the door any time in the next decade. Give me $50 million or so, and I don't think I'd ever get anything done again, especially not something as demanding and intense as game development.
I'd just get stuck at the stripper motion capture sessions the press has mentioned
I have the worst posture, and do everything "wrong" when it comes to RSI, and have almost never suffered from it. The only time I did is when I decided it would be a good idea to try assuming a "correct" posture. My wrist and hands started hurting within a week.
I'm constantly shifting around in my seat, changing postures, and therefore the angles of my hands/wrists. The big thing for me is that if it starts hurting, or feeling uncomfortable, shift around until I find the pressure is relieved. If nothing's working, take a break and stretch out my wrists, arms, and fingers. Half the RSI sufferers I know seem to get into this masochistic mode where they just keep typing away even when things start hurting.
C'mon people, if it hurts try doing something a little different. Don't just rigidly sit in the same posture trying to work through it. Move around a little!
Jack Wagner writes:
It's generally known that studies have shown that teams of four can develop code one order of magnitude faster than 4 coders working separately and my experience backs that up.
Really? Have any links to real studies to point this out? Did you get the information from a friend of a friend, too?
Sorry, my experience does not agree with you. A great team of four can *maybe* be faster than four on their own, but certainly not 10x the speed.
Extreme Programming has some interesting points, some of which I have taken to heart, but in general its just a way to sell books and consulting services. I was consulting for Chrysler while Kent Beck (the "father" of extreme programming) was working on the C3 project (the foundational project for extreme programming), and the project was not exactly the success story its made to be.
Like I said, some good ideas, but it isn't worth the religious status people have given it.
- Scratch pad versions. Ever needed to play around
with a piece of code (put in debug statements,
or change part of it temporarily to help debug
something) but didn't want to check it out
and have the threat of making the changes
accidentally permanent? Envy had the ability
to make a "scratch" version of a file - letting
you edit it, but not worry about accidental
check ins, or forgetting that you had made a
file writeable.
- Version/Releases. Not only could you label
a specific state of an application a "version"
but you could also label a version of an
app a "release". This allowed some subtle
distinctions between "ok here's a workable
version we can get back to (demo)" and "here's
the real, outgoing released version".
- Manager. Code could be given specific people
that were the manager, or "owner" of a piece
of code. If you wanted to enter your changes
into the code base in general, you had to get
the owner to do it. This control could be
anywhere from every check-in, to version or
releases. An owner could give permissions to
other people as well.
- Multiple checkouts. Envy recognized that
sometimes people have to work on the same
file, as much as its best prevented. So,
it allowed multiple check-outs, with facilities
to integrated the files back together on
check-in.
It was quite complex, but looking back at it I now understand why many of the facilities were there and die to have them for my team. We're using SourceSafe (blech), and it works ok, but something like Envy would be great.- there needs to be a country named "USA"
- there needs to be a state named "Michigan"
- there needs to be a city named "Grand Rapids"
- there needs to be a woman named "Jackie" that
is of Norwegian heritage
- there needs to be a man named "Don" that is of
extremely mixed heritage
- they have to meet and marry
- they have to have two previous children, one
5 1/2 years old and female, one 8 years old and
male
- and then they have to all to take a trip to
a place called "Florida", with its especially
fertile air.
- "grandparents" must live in this place, and
these beings must take care of the aforementioned "kids" for an evening.
- both "Jackie" and "Don" must be in the mood.
and *then* you get me.
Since this is obviously amazing unlikely to ever
occur again, I have therefore proved that no
one in the world exists but me.
Ta-daaaaa!
Me.
(Gosh its lonely)
Does anyone know if there's any work being done to put a 3d chip of some sort (even an "old" one like a voodoo or permedia2 or tnt) into a PDA?
I'm sure there's some power issues involved, but I know I'd shell out $600 for that!
We've been doing optical gesture recognition tech for several years now. Funded by various grants from various organizations, we have one product (Use Your Head) that uses a normal USB camera (only on Windows though, sorry) and turns a person head motions into keystrokes. The intent of that product is to turn the normal head-bobbing and weaving seen by people playing FPSs into actual movements. It uses < 5% CPU and is completely customizable including sensitivity.
If you want, check it out at:
Main Gestures Site
Use Your Head Site
Ron Hay
Turing Machinist
Cybernet Systems Corp.
That was the planned initial public release -- nothing was actually released then.
This (August 9th) release was the first code that could be downloaded.
Cybernet Systems Corp makes a similar system, except it tracks your head (side-to-side, up-and-down movements) without the need for a dot on your forehead. Uses a normal webcam (windows only, sorry). So its nice and cheap. Visit the web site for more info about how this can be used in a game. (Eye tracking doesn't work at all in an action game, but shifting your head side to side does).
Ron Hay
Turing Machinist
Cybernet Systems Corp
Current project: Edge of Extinction -- free massive-multiplayer game. Release in a couple of days.
Actually, the article simply paraphrases a talk he gave at Game Developers 2000. The talk was much more in-depth and much more technical. It was one of the more interesting talks last year, although it was more of a "here's my life experience" talk than "here's algorithm X" talk. The reason it is salient is that Abrash has *been* there - Joe Schmoe hasn't. Plus Abrash is an excellent writer, and fun speaker.
The game of life that is the title of the second page is part of the talk that he gave (but not included in the article) where he speaks on optimizing the Game of Life. He starts out with being able to get ~3 generations a second, and after some interesting ideas, ends up at 200+ generations a second.
Taken by itself, the article is a tad fluffy, though.
I switched from a TNT2 card to a G400 card once. I've never had so many problems with a card in my life. I ended up having to rebuild the entire system, just to switch back to my TNT2 card. The thing I have to say about Matrox is that they have very *responsive* tech support. The responded quickly to my questions with many different patches and drivers and bios upgrades. None of them worked right, so I wouldn't say tech support was effective. The best out there is Nvidia, really. Great cards, great drivers.
Actually, UseYourHead doesn't have a problem with low-light (a completely dark room won't work) or even low-contrast situations. It works fine with different colored skin tones as well. It takes up less than 5% on a mid range (500 mhz athlon/p3) system, and actually is capable of more than simple, 2-D translation. I'm not sure of the exact specs, but if you are interested, email us and we can give you a better idea of how it works.
Ron Hay
rhay@cybernet.com
Developer/Designer
Cybernet Systems Corp
Except UseYourHead doesn't use a special camera, and doesn't require you to put a dot on your forehead (you still can if you want, though).
We thought of many amusing names around the office including, "UseBothHeads! The hands-free web-surfing interface"
-RH
> I'm waiting for the NES PowerGlove to make it's way onto the PC.
Actually, Cybernet is helping Essential Reality do just that. They made the original one, and we're helping them make the current incarnation which is a much more sophisticated USB device. Supposedly it comes out sometime this year, and the harried look on our Lead Engineer for the project leads me to believe they'll probably meet that deadline...
Ron Hay
rhay@cybernet.com
Game Designer/Developer
Cybernet Systems Corp.
Coming from inside Cybernet, I have a bit more info on the product for those that are interested.
:)
First, the product uses very little CPU (less than 5%) and given that it runs off of normal webcams (which typically have a framerate of less than 30fps) has little lag.
Second, the product is purely "optical" - you don't have to attach dots or sensors or anything to your head.
Third, the device isn't meant to replace the keyboard/mouse/joystick (I pounded mightily on the UseYourHead group in the beginning that gamers - specially FPS gamers - will never want to go away from their controller of choice) - but it basically gives you an unobtrusive tertiary device.
Fourth, it moves by tracking translational movement (left, right, up, down) not rotational movement of your head (twisting). It was obvious from the start that a device requiring you to take your eyes off the screen was a bad idea.
Finally, a bit more information about the tech. UseYourHead runs off of Cybernet's Gesture Technology which was developed on various Military R&D contracts and is capable of identifying complex gestures, where a "gesture" can be a series of positions by anything from your hand to your head or even your feet or something held in your hand. Think of slapping a camera on your TV and never having to search for your remote again because you can wave the channels up or down, or use simple signals to specify a channel.
UseYourHead is the first foray into commercial-land for this technology. We wanted something simple, something basic, something useful. Originally intended almost entirely for the first person shooter market, we recognized the basic motions most people make when playing those game is to weave, duck, and try to peer around corners, over ledges, ie. head tracking. Head tracking is *really* simple for the gesture tech, the hard part was getting it to work as fast as possible with the relatively slow web cams.
As a first pass, UseYourHead takes head movements and lets you map them to keystrokes. Its the simplest setup that allows UseYourHead to work well with almost all existing games. However, game developers can directly integrate support for UseYourHead (through a DirectInput wrapper) and have a more continous motion. Imagine your screen as a window into the virtual world, and as you try to peer around a corner, the game smoothly shifts to give you the correct perspective. Even more interesting, game developers can use our tech to access more complicated gestures. For instance, the game Black & White has a system for casting spells in it that requires you to make gestures with your mouse, imagine being able to use your hand directly to make those gestures (Somatic components from D&D
Oh, and while UseYourHead is meant for Windows, all the original tech runs on various versions of Unix (Cybernet puts out a Linux product called Netmax as well)
Feel free to email me if you have any questions, or visit Cybernet's web site for more company info)
Ron Hay
rhay@cybernet.com
Game Designer/Developer
Cybernet Systems Corp