Google Super Sync Sports Turns Your Phone Into A Gamepad 36
Deathspawner writes "Using a mobile device to control an application on a PC, media player or video game console, isn't too uncommon, but it is when the content being controlled is a game. Just how possible would it be to play a fairly fast-paced game on your PC via your mobile device? Google wanted to find out, so it crafted a game called Super Sync Sports, where you control an athlete on your desktop or notebook via controls on your phone or tablet. To make a game like this possible, Google turned to WebSockets for real-time collaboration between two devices, HTML5 for the audio, Canvas for the graphics, and CSS3 for the styling and transitions."
It appears that it routes your controls through the Internet rather than locally. Something like this over bluetooth or wifi with a shared touch screen might be cool for electronic board games.
WebRTC (Score:5, Informative)
This is about browser-browser communication, using your android as a bluetooth gamepad/mouse/remote is old news, there are a million apps to do just that.
WebRTC could let the two browsers talk through the local wifi, instead of having to bounce off the 'net.
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Mod parent up.
WebRTC specification: http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/webrtc.html#rtcdatachannel [w3.org]
A nice experiment using WebRTC for P2P traffic in browsers: (well Chrome only for now, actually)
https://github.com/piranna/ShareIt#readme [github.com]
ShareIt is a javascript P2P filesharing system. And yes, if you are thinking about a torrent-isch setup, that is in the works also, one is called Ampere.
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It's odd that that app is Chrome-only, since currently Firefox supports DataChannels and Chrome does not.
Looks like it's because they're using a DataChannel polyfill and didn't even bother testing if it works in the real DataChannels in Firefox!
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Re:Having a temper tantrum and... (Score:5, Insightful)
No tactile feedback (Score:3)
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Volume isn't reserved for the system. My e book app uses it to turn pages.
Come to think of it, I've pressed volume up on my phone about fifteen thousand times in the last year. I wonder what the mean presses to failure is.
Remapping the volume buttons (Score:3)
Volume isn't reserved for the system. My e book app uses it to turn pages.
An application intended for quiet enjoyment, such as a paged document reader, can get away with that. An application with sound, such as a video game, not so much. When sound is playing, the user expects to have a volume control, not to have the volume up and down buttons remapped to jump and fire.
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Not quite true - phone vibration when you touch a control on the screen is the very definition of tactile feedback, as haptic technology *is* a kind of tactile feedback.
It's also possible to address the lack of physical buttons by ensuring that the virtual controls are organized and segregated logically/intuitively, reducing or removing the need for visually identifying the controls. Many tablet/phone games already do this, mimicking "
Precisely centering the thumbs (Score:3)
Not quite true - phone vibration when you touch a control on the screen is the very definition of tactile feedback
But is it useful tactile feedback? Physical buttons have edges that the thumb's touch sensors feel in order to know where the thumb is positioned relative to the button so that the user can recenter the thumb over the button before actually pressing it. It's the same reason that your PC's keyboard has bumps on the F and J, so that a typist can identify the home row while looking at the display, and gap
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That's actually exactly what Google was thinking about when they decided to check out WebSockets [html5rocks.com], which kills the standard HTTP overhead and keeps an existing connection open between client(s)/server.
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If they do it over then LAN (which they don't, but there's no reason why they shouldn't. maybe security limitations in the browser) they should get around 5 ms latency (ping). They don't need a round-trip, so it's half the ping time. If you can set TCP NODELAY with WebSockets, that should be achieveable with TCP. The problem is if there's a transmission error, you get retransmissions and delays. As each frame on the screen lasts for 16 ms at 60 Hz, the latency should be acceptable for most games
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...I can't see such a thing taking off...
A lot of things Google does never take off. The point is that they make cool stuff even if there's little or no business case for it. I like that they are always showing the untapped potential of the ubiquitous tools we already have. I like that they make ways to make things work together, then share the tools for us all to use.
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What you describe is AirPlay Mirroring, which requires close physical proximity.
This submission is touching on Google using WebSockets for game communication over the internet, which is far different from your example, and has 2 distinct advantages over AirPlay:
- There is no proprietary protocol requirement using specific hardware.
- Gaming can be played between people who aren't physically located together.
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Nope, not at all. read again. It's the Mac OSx version of RealRacing 2 that you control either with a keyboard/gamepad OR from safari on your IOS device with the tilt sensor.
you don't need the IOS version of Real Racing 2. It is NOT airplay mirroring.
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Oh, ok, my bad! Thanks for that clarification.
RR2 on OS X controlled via an iOS device, however, still requires both your mac and your phone/tablet to be on the same wifi network (source [getsatisfaction.com]), very likely to handle the otherwise (relatively) high latency of an internet connection. This makes Google's work still relevant, given they're looking at users that may not be physically located together.
Wheee... (Score:2)
Great. So I can use my phone as a third-rate shitty gamepad that's going to misfire, register phantom touches, ignore deliberate ones, kill me 7 times before I make it to level 2, and lag by at least 50-100ms under the most ideal circumstances possible.
Now, if someone makes a case for the Galaxy S3 that works with an extended battery & gives it a nice slide-out gamepad that's at least as good as the one on a GBA, or a clamp that lets me attach my S3 to a PS3 or 360 controller (with extended battery and
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I have an Xperia play, and while the analog controls are total shit, I do think it would make a nifty game controller in a miniature Wii U kind of way. Which brings me to a question, why has nobody popped an accelerometer into a game controller in addition to all the normal stuff? Or has someone, and I just didn't notice? I owned one of those Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Sharkjumper controllers that gave you analog via an accelerometer, which was a horrible thing to try to play a game with. You could play a raci
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Wiimotes have accelerometers, so did the PS3's Sixaxis.
The wiimote doesn't count, because that's its whole mechanism, and it's not a normal gamepad with that added on. But I didn't know that about the sixaxis. I've never actually played a PS3, I only know one person who owns one. Oh wait, two. I know a dozen or so people who own a 360. This means little if anything but I find it interesting.
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Not quite... the Wiimote DOES have a proper 8-way digital gamepad with buttons a-la-NES. They kind of suck, in a middle school finger pain kind of way, but they DO exist.
That said, it's hard to think of ways to make good use of an accelerometer and gyro in a proper digital+analog 360-like gamepad, even though the Sixaxis tries. You can't really hold one confidently with one hand, and if you're holding it with two and using the digital or analog sticks/pads, chances are you DON'T want it reading intentions i
I don't always (Score:1)
I don't always use a controller, but when I do, I use a piece of flat glass.
BT Controller does what the poster wanted (Score:2)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=droidbean.btcontroller [google.com]
BT Controller for Android, basically lets you set up a gamepad on your phone(you create or download the layout) by syncing two android based and bluetooth capable devices.
Not affiliated with it, though I have used it.
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A bunch of iOS games also do this, and there's a general purpose gamepad app as well I believe.
This isn't new. The other iOS and Android implementations don't require going through the web back to Google either.
what? (Score:2)
so to use a phone in my hands less than 2 foot away from my pc I now have to send that signal around the globe using the intertubes?
Rube Goldberg would cry if he saw todays world
MIDI over Wi-Fi/BT has low enough latency already (Score:2)
Playing instruments on iPad or iPhone that are being recorded as MIDI data on a Mac works great. Music has the same need for low latency as gaming controls. The only downside is you generally have to create an ad-hoc network between the devices so that you're not also running Internet over there or whatever other traffic may be on your proper Wi-Fi network.
Also iPads and iPhones running GarageBand can connect via Bluetooth so that you can play instruments on one and record on the other.
Discount Jeans,handbags,jersey,sunglasses sale (Score:1)