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News Mad Genius Controller prototype unveiled

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Gareth Halfacree, 13 May 2013.

  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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  2. SAimNE

    SAimNE What's a Dremel?

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    now to combine this with the completed version of those gloves that let you "feel" stuff... and i shall cry tears of joy.
     
  3. edzieba

    edzieba Virtual Realist

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    From the looks of it, they've pulled the pad and coil boards from Sixense's Hydra, crammed them into two halves of a 360 gamepad with the buttons wired up, and added a mediator (probably an ubiquitous ARM SoC) to mediate the raw position and orientation data in order to do the gesture recognition. Or maybe the mediator is still done in software on a demonstrator PC and they don't have any self-built hardware yet. The cables do look like they run into a wooden box that could hide the transmission coils from a disassembled Hydra.


    If they are actually using their own magnatometer tech (and manage not to fall afoul of Sixense' or Polhemus' patents), and reveal raw position & orientation data with minimal delay (real, without any gesture recognition nonsense), then this could take over from the Razer Hydra as the controller du jour for the Oculus.



    Unfairly cynical? Maybe. But I've seen plenty of 'revolutionary' motion control and tracking systems that have turned out to be anything but that I now assume them to be either scams or massive naivety until some hard data is provided.
     
  4. Zurechial

    Zurechial Elitist

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    Interesting approach, Horrible latency.
     
  5. Sloth

    Sloth #yolo #swag

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    The claim of unavoidable delays, is that made from looking at the video or an actual reported drawback from the creators? It would seem that the quote from the developers clarifies what appears to be huge latency.

    With just a little bit of figuring what's actually going on in terms of what the controller is telling the game it would seem that the "swing hammer" motion must be entirely completed for the controller to recognize it and report a "swing hammer" input to the game, which then begins the hammer swing animation. The controller is effectively turning the "swing hammer" motion into a standard input like "X button" since Skyrim doesn't support real time motion capture for melee weapons.

    Just look at the movement and aiming, particularly the over the shoulder portion, to get a better idea of latency involved. It's not extreme.
     
  6. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    From watching the video. I couldn't very well write an article about the video without watching it, could I? ;)

    Who said it was extreme? I describe the delay as "unavoidable," not "extreme" or "huge" - both words you have used in your comment. As the article explains, and as confirmed by the developer, the system works by recognising the gesture and *then* triggering the action. As a result, the delay - the start of the in-game attack action always occurring at the end of the gesture motion - is unavoidable, a drawback of the technique used.

    Now, whether that would "ruin immersion" as I claimed depends entirely on the player: it would certainly annoy me, but then again I'm not a huge fan of gesture recognition gaming in the first place.
     

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