Long gone are the days of mashing the B button or A button on your Nintendo Entertainment System. It seems like most console systems are experimenting with motion these days, even PCs are starting to use facial tracking as a login to your windows account, in which motion is required to get a full profile of your face.
I first took note of this type of technology back when the Sony Playstation2 launched the EyeToy. There were several other brands that offered this type of entertainment, but it was Nintendo Wii that took it to the next stage. For a successful brand to make the transition from traditional controller to a wireless motion tracking controller, must have been an interesting conversation. I think it is safe to say that this feature defined the Nintendo Wii console.
With the competition looking for new ways to capture more of the market, Xbox has undertaken something called “Project Natal”. This isn’t a secret technology, but the method in which they are talking about using it could be new, as it looks to compete with the Wii style of gaming where the player has to move around vs sitting in the chair mashing buttons.
So is this the next type of gaming system that will take off? Or have people already tried motion tracking and given up on it with preference to traditional controllers? There are some interesting ways to use this technology.
Let’s add one more layer by introducing a new technology still in the works, simply called “Skinput”. It uses sensors to detect “mechanical vibrations that propagate through the body”. You can read more about the technology here (PDF). By the way, the company behind this technology is, you guessed it, Microsoft Research along with the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
Source:
- http://mashable.com/2010/03/03/skinput-turns-your-body-into-a-touchscreen-video/
- http://www.xbox.com/en-ca/live/projectnatal/
- http://www.ted.com/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html
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