Losing Control

Originally published in Develop issue 69, February 2007. Reproduced here with kind permission of Michael French. 

I finally had a chance to play on a Wii; a friend brought theirs round at New Year. It was like Christmas Part II as we unboxed it. But after a decent session playing Wii Sports and Rayman, I felt out-of-touch; I totally sucked at baseball. This new fangled controller will take some getting used to. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still excited at the possibilities that the Wii has to offer, but I do have nagging doubts over its longevity. 

I’m not sure that the controller, Nintendo’s ace, will turn out to be much of a USP; the technology is hardly new. 

This led me to ponder what other technologies we might come to see? Most of this is speculation, garnered from patent gibberish and mixed with my own thoughts. 

Sony has Sixaxis and EyeToy. Combine them and you have something approaching a ‘Wii-mote’. Dig around some recent Sony patent applications and you’ll find cameras and ‘photonically detectable elements’.  The PS3 pad has a few LEDs; that should work like a reverse Wii set-up. 

Just as interesting, is the reference to the use of a microphone array, used to ‘deduce information on the location and/or orientation of the joystick controller and/or its user’. I’m really surprised that this hasn’t been picked up by the gaming sites. 

Combine this with voice and facial recognition and you could pick out and track players’ voices. 

The other Sony patent is the ‘3D’ camera. It’s just a standard camera and clever algorithms to determine position and orientation. Most interesting is the reconstruction of the original object in 3D. 

There are true 3D solutions out there too, but one problem with them is that you can only obtain the depth of the parts facing the lens. Multiple cameras might help, but then you’re into mo-cap territory, which seems out of the question. 

Or is it?

Perhaps others could be used. Taking inspiration from the medicine might help; the GameTrak Fusion uses ultrasound to determine position and motion. Sounds promising, but such third party peripherals have never hit it big.

And Microsoft of course has a number of controller patents, and has already had experience of motion-sensing with their Sidewinder Freestyle Pro, now eight-years-old. 

It’s a brave and canny move that Nintendo has taken, and it’s truly driving players’ expectations. However, I’m still after something a bit more. Perhaps with accelerometers and gyros being so small now, somebody will embed them in your clothes. Imagine the possibilities being completely freed from the console. 

Unless you’re being tracked by GPS.