Next Generation of Gyroscopic Controllers on the Horizon 127
Jamie found a story about a next gen input device that is functionally similiar to the Wii, but instead of using IR, it gets all location information from gyroscopes and accelerometers. This has the potential to be more accurate and maybe not require me to contort my wrist to bizarre angles in order to successfully collect the stars that are like oxygen to me.
I'll stick with the mouse... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'll stick with the mouse... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'll stick with the mouse... (Score:4, Informative)
The reason a mouse and keyboard is so effective is because you can use them both all day long with little to no effort.
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Any input device that requires you to continually keep your hands elevated will never work.
Whoa, whoa, in what context? Maybe for coding in Eclipse, but if you're talking about input devices in general, that's just batcrap loco. The Wii, and pretty much all game consoles ever, have been working just fine with input devices where your hands are "elevated."
The reason a mouse and keyboard is so effective is because you can use them both all day long with little to no effort.
Uh, no. The reason they're effective is because they're intuitive and they let you work efficiently, not because you can use them all day long. A two-button keyboard where you press the button to scroll through input characters with one and acc
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Unless you are Stephen Hawking or Jean Dominique Bauby [wikipedia.org].
Generally I agree with your points and I don't normally post to just contradict people, but I work with clients who use computers via two-button inputs (and even one-button inputs) on a daily basis.
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Re:I'll stick with the mouse... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they aren't elevated. These controllers are held with the player's elbows resting on their knees or arm rests. The hands themselves may be elevated, but there is clearly support preventing the arms from getting tired.
If someone is standing playing the Wii people wont face the same strain because they aren't holding their arm up, relatively motionless. They're swinging the controller around like a tool, However, I can't imagine playing a game like Metroid Prime or Zelda where someone is standing there with arms elevated for hours on end. At that point they'll be holding the controller more conventionally with arms at rest.
And certainly, there's no way in hell anyone would want to sit in front of a computer all day at work with their arms elevated and swinging around.
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And who said this is for sitting in front of a computer all day in the first place? In that case, it's simply inconvenient to have to move your hands in front of your face much simply because it interferes with your vision; you'll be annoyed by that well before your arms tire.
Re:I'll stick with the mouse... (Score:4, Funny)
I control my computer with a 3/4 scale reproduction of a Gibson SG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Guitar-hero-controller.jpg [wikipedia.org]
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\m/ > \m/
Rock on, dude.
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It might instead be argued that the available input devices drive the paradigms of input. New, improved, innovative input methodologies open up human-computer interaction to new applications and ideas.
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It isn't trying to be the most comfortable, it is trying to be the closest facsimile to the simulated object.
If keeping an object elevated was always wrong, then we would never have enjoyed the use of light-guns and they are still popular in arcades.
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Is that why no one plays real golf? What do you think people will be doing with this, or are doing with the Wii now? All games don't require constant manipulation of input controls, especially 'party games' like the Wii Sports and Wii Play collections. Playing
Still needs camera interface (Score:5, Insightful)
I could see a combination providing a much more enhanced experience, though.
The difficulty will come when developers try and create user interfaces that are intuitive and don't quickly tire the user's arms.
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If it was ideal, then commercial motion capture companies would be using it. Right?
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It's not exactly like the Wii... the Wii tracks IR emitters, whereas motion capture more commonly uses reflective spheres and a separate light source. Also the camera is stationary, and the light sources are moving in motion capture, whereas in the Wii it's the other way around.
But I would say the two techniques are a lot closer than you seem to think.
Re:Still needs camera interface (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is, those extra sensors are not cheap (currently) -- esp. compared to the stuff in the wiimote. The $99 price projection is likely a pipe-dream or on such narrow margins that Nintendo would never take such a thing seriously.
Note that TFA says this thing tracks absolute position which is an error -- it tracks absolute orientation. It's position sensing will be short-time relative at best.
This is the Wii remote, minus functionality (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is the Wii remote, minus functionality (Score:5, Informative)
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It's not hard to confuse the Wii remote's gyro sensors via erratic motion, or a combination of motions it doesn't understand.
While this seems like a step up in that respect, there are very few applications that are useful on the Wii without the IR component as a frame of reference for where the screen is.
At best, this would require a quick calibration
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Both of those statements are false. Regarding the first statement: contrary to its name, the Wii "Sensor Bar" is not actually a sensor at all. It's an infrared beacon which gives the Wii Remote a
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That's exactly what the GP said.
So magnetic north is not a point of reference?
"collect the stars"? (Score:5, Informative)
If that was a reference to Super Mario Galaxy, I'd have to say you must be playing wrong. SMG leverages far less Wii controller range of motion than most other Wii games I've tried. WarioWare Smooth Moves gives a bunch of cute names to various Wiimote controller positions, so it's handy to talk about other games with these terms too. SMG just uses "Remote Control" and "Umbrella" postures, and to spin you need to shake the Wiimote a little. If you want wacky untenable wrist positions, try some of the later levels of Kokorinpa (Marble Mania). There are wrist positions in that game that even Smooth Moves didn't try to name, but I'll call them "Policeman's Thumblock" and "Say Uncle."
It's not the Wii... (Score:4, Funny)
Where is the TV? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wii already uses MEMS accelerometers (Score:3, Informative)
Gyroscopes give dfferent info (Score:2)
An accelerometer can only measure acceleration. An accelerometer cannot tell the difference between a tilt and other accelerations. Think of the acceleration you feel that pushes you back into your car seat: you can't tell if thats due to the car accelerating or tilting (going up hill).
A gyro, on the other hand, is immune to accelerations. A gyro tells you the attitude of the device
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I find it highly unlikely that the Wii controllers are going to use that information in any meaningful way.
All the Wii games that require tilt information (i.e. almost all) use gravity to get it. It is really pretty simple, the Wiimote returns acceleration in X, Y and Z direction, whenever the acceleration is not null it is gravity accelerating the Wiimote. (x,y,z) simply becomes the vector that points down to earth, which allows you to calculate pitch and roll rather easily, but not yaw, Wiimote can't track that. This of course only works as long as you hold the Wiimote still, as soon as you move it around the
This would be great for VR (Score:2)
Next gen? (Score:5, Funny)
Article not very accurate... (Score:4, Informative)
Firstly, while it is called the "sensor bar", it isn't a sensor at all, it is just a row of IR emitters. There is no receiver on the bar. Instead, there is an infrared camera in the Wii Remote that takes a "picture" of the bar to figure out which way the remote is pointed.
Also, the IR system is only used as as calibration for the accelerometers. The accelerometers in the Wii Remote still do the bulk of the work. If the Wii Remote relied on the IR camera as the primary sensor, it would be useless every time line of sight to the sensor bar was lost. What the Wii Remote does is keep rough track of remote position using the accelerometers, and then when the camera is pointed at the sensor bar, it re-calculates the starting point for the motion tracking to start from.
As far as this outfit using the fact that golf on the Wii leads to bad golf habits in real life: Duh! The Wii is a toy; it is not meant to be an accurate golfing simulator.
I can fully understand Nintendo not putting gyro's in the Wii Remote. It would have driven up the cost, reduced battery life, and introduced a moving part just begging to break.
SirWired
Re:Article not very accurate... (Score:5, Informative)
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The only information you (the Wii) gets from the wiimote for IR is the X,Y position of each IR source (up to 4, the sensor bar has only 2). It doesn't even give you the X,Y position you are pointing at, you have to use the other information to calculate what it is.
Given this limited amount of information, unless the wiimote does it internally somehow, it doesn't recalibrate itself. If you knew that two dots are 11 inches apart (I'm not sure if that is the d
Re:Article not very accurate... (Score:4, Informative)
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What do you mean the "only thing IR is used for is yaw, depth... X, Y position?" What else is there besides X, Y, a
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As in, the camera sees the IR bar, and notes that the Remote is currently pointed 20-degrees "up" from horizontal. Somebody then walks in front of the remote... while the signal is blocked, the user points it a further 10 degrees up, according to the accelerometers; the software then knows to send a 30-degree Y signal to the console. The interloper then stops blocking the camera, and it the remote discovers that it was really 31-degrees, it uses this new information to correct the signal and compensate for the drift.
I don't think I follow this. If you point the wiimote at your screen then block the IR signal from reaching the camera the Wii will drop any pointing activity. So the wiimote will not send to the wii what it thinks the change was based on the previous IR data, it will only send the lack of IR data and the current accelerometer values. If this is what you meant by drift then they eliminated the problem by ignoring anything that they couldn't directly observe
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Do you have a Wii? Because that's exactly what it does. The motion sensing of course works, but pointing does not.
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In my experience this is actually true. It does become useless when it loses sight of the sensor bar. Now I've only used the Wii Twice but both times have been negative. One was with boxing and the movement on the screen wasn't even close to what I was doing with the remote. Half of the time it wouldn't even punch when I did. My other experience was with Tomb Rader which uses the Wiimote to aim the gun. Holy Crap was this craptacular!
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This is why he has a Wii remote held stationary, with infrared emitters being used in place of the sensor bar to get various neat user interfaces to work.
Accelerometers are susceptible to cumulative errors that would make them useless for an accurate pointing device. The accelerometers in the Wii remote help it detect the angle its at (wii sports u
Real-Life Representation (Score:1)
"There's a complaint with 'Tiger Woods' on the Wii, for example, in that some bloggers feel that it has actually harmed their ability to play golf," he says. "They've adjusted over the winter period to the Wii to play this game, and then when they actually pick up a club, they're not swinging the way they did the previous season." If the Motus can be marketed as such a realistic controller so that it helps, rather than harms, real-life game play, Riley says, it could find its niche.
This is probably my chief complaint with the Wii Sports games: I match my motion to that on-screen, not vice-versa (which it should be). Chiefly, I'm thinking of Wii Bowling, where you press a button to "initiate" the swing, which then proceeds at its own rate irrelevant of your own arm speed and/or technique. I found it exceptionally hard to play the game, at first, because I had to change my bowling technique to match the game. Tennis, too, has problems, where any subtle flick of your
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Huh? That's not true at all. You can control the speed, direction, and spin of the on-screen ball by the way you swing. Just the point of release seems to be automatic, IIRC. Maybe you found the game exceptionally hard because you didn't figure that out
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Better boxing? (Score:2)
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Maybe they just didn't have the time to get it
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"collect the stars that are like oxygen to me" (Score:2)
if you don't get the stars, you get the spiders on your arms ***SHAKE***
Bah (Score:2)
IR has more than Gyroscopes (Score:5, Informative)
The wiimote uses a 3-axis accelerometer to calculate roll, yaw, as well as gravity forces on each axis; this gives everything except for yaw. Yaw would be nice but it really isn't needed because the shape of the object in your hand doesn't feel nature (or comfortable) to rotate it in that direction. To solve the issue of pointing the wiimote uses a camera sensitive to IR light and captures it at 1024x768 resolution. Since the wii sensor bar has two dots the virtual screen resolution is actually slightly bigger than that.
In addition to actually pointing at the screen the wiimote's IR camera can also be used to estimate the distance you are from the TV. So in all the wiimote has several degrees of freedom:
- Pitch
- Roll
- Yaw (very limited with IR)
- Distance
- X,Y position on the TV
With all of this you get a pretty decent idea of where the wiimote is in 3d space and at what orientation it is at.Now consider the distance you are from your TV. As you move further away then the angle you should move the wiimote either up, down, left, or right should also decrease because the object. The wiimote can do that because of the IR camera. If you use a gyroscope you lose this because no matter where you are in 3d space it only cares about the orientation it is with respect to gravity. So if you are aiming at the top of your TV and you move backwards with a gyroscope then it will still be aiming at the top, whereas with the wiimote it will go above the top because that's where you're actually pointing the device.
With a gyroscope and accelerometer you would get:
- Pitch
- Roll
- Yaw
That's about it. No distance, no X,Y position.I think the wiimote still wins out. The only thing that I would change with the wiimote is give it a higher resolution IR camera, but maybe that was too expensive for Nintendo (that may also have been a reason they didn't do high def?)
Also you can already use the wiimote on a PC [wiiuse.net] for free and have millions of potential customers already owning one. So why would anyone want to pay royalties to use this thing?
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I'm really no expert, so take that as a question, not a correction.
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Cost is a big thing with the Wii. Currently the controller does the job for most people and at a cost that they can afford. There are better accelerometers and gyros around, but they tend to be expensive. If they could create a new and improved Wiimote, at a cost the market is
Inertial navigation and basic calculus (Score:3, Insightful)
So, if you have accelerometer data (acceleration), you integrate once to get speed, and then integrate that to get distance. If you begin the process by seeding with a known position, then the initial known position summed with the distance calculated gives the new position.
This is exactly how inertial navigation systems on flight vehicles work.
However, accuracy over time is a function of the
Re:spatial disorientation (Score:2)
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Remember that if you differentiate distance with time, you get velocity; differentiate again, you get acceleration.
True in theory, however when you start with inaccurate accelerometer data, it gets even more inaccurate when you integrate it to velocity and when you integrate that again to get position data you are basically left with unusable gibberish. And you also have to keep in mind that the Wiimote is not giving you acceleration in world-space, it gives you accelerations in Wiimote-space, which as soon you as you move it around ends up basically unusable for anything, since you can no longer know which acceleratio
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Not new (Score:1)
Samurai Sword (Score:3, Funny)
Yaarrrrr! When be they making one to resemble me cutlass? When do we pirates get our'n?
Gyros (Score:2)
Battery power? (Score:2)
Sorry, I don't see it.
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Seriously, though, I can't tell from TFA, but if they're planning on using gyro-sensors like those in some digital cameras, those probably don't draw that much power.
drift is an issue (Score:2, Informative)
This is a great step forward but does not mean current IR strategies are necessarily old news. The blend of these two systems holds the future.
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Hacker project... (Score:3, Interesting)
If it can be hacked, and converted into an inertial navigation system... Then the Wii will run afoul of ITAR export regulations... Truly the mark of all sufficiently advanced video game systems.
A really crappy INS (Score:2)
It's true - you could attempt to use the consumer grade sensors in the Wii to create an INS, but even with deeply-integrated, GPS-aided nav solution, it would perform so badly that it would be unusable for military applications. Inertial sensors come in several "grades", each one based on how much position drift it has - strategic (< 100 ft/hour), navigation (< 1 nautical mile/hr), tactical (< 10 nautical miles/hr), and consumer/automotive/commercial grade (worse than that). Tactical grade sensors
stars are not a problem (Score:2)
The _real_ improvement would be the ability to use it as a light saber. Right now, games just recognize 2 or 3 movements (slash, stab, etc), and play a fixed animation, which is bullshit. That is what they need to improve (and they probably will, I know that sony and nintendo are pretty desperate for someone who can program a lightsab
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You are so stuck in 2007. Welcome to 2008 [metacritic.com]. A limited repertoire of movements recognized and corresponding canned animations is a detail of the implementation, and does not necessarily indicate a limitation of the hardware.
It's coming [gametrailers.com]. Current release date is August 2008.
to go boldly (Score:4, Interesting)
Holodeck.
Surely "Dead Reckoning" is less accurate (Score:2)
Gyroscopes? (Score:2)
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There are other physical phenomena, some mechanical, some optical, some quantum mechanical, that can detect changes in orientation. For better or wo
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I can't believe noone linked this before... (Score:2)
Reality check (Score:2)
BTW I though that the nintendo WII controller has already embedded accellerometers and gyroscopes. At least for the nunjago attachment!
Gyroscopic Mass? (Score:2)
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I thought the whole point of the Wii was to try to incorporate realistic motion to the gaming world, without VR. The odd twists and motions of the Wii would still be there with a more accurate controller, just a lot more expensive and fragile (currently, smashing a broken Wii controller against the floor fixes most problems with the motion sensor [not the IR]). For most purposes the current Wii controller is just fine. This may be useful for creating extra controllers, though, like for feet.
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Also, it's as much about how talented the game developers are at interpreting the infornation from the remote. Whilst earlier games often had clumsy controls, they seem to be getting better at it.
But as others have pointed out, most games opt fo
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Re:The Wiimote's failures (Score:4, Interesting)
b.) The Light Zapper accessory addresses this problem, and you don't need $100 new controller with less features to do it.
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I can't understand why Nintendo doesn't create real windows/linux/mac drivers so pc/mac games can also officially use the wiimote..
Nintendo has given up on PC and homecomputers a long long while ago, they do want their own consoles, not develop for somebody else hardware. It would also be stupid to release the only thing that that makes the Wii unique on another platform.
That aside there really isn't a need for an official driver, you already can get drivers for Windows, Mac and Linux, there really isn't much if anything left that isn't known about the Wiimote. People can use it if they want. The problem is non-standard peripheral don
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