We have commented in the past that we are converts to touch ‘ that gaming, at least hand held gaming, enters a new intuitive world where you need no learning curve for the game controls, meaning that learning is only required for the game play itself.
The iPod Touch has attracted many new adherents to touch, and now the word is spreading, as device makers everywhere realize that they must ‘ape’ the touch aspects of the iPhone and the iPod Touch, to capture any top end market share at all, so they also realize that they need to copy the business model that Apple has set for applications, content and games.
Suddenly games, which were once tied to physical storage, and therefore retail distribution, long after game downloads were feasible and in fact more desirable to consumers, are finally caving in to the App Store formula that Apple has had a hit record with. This will see touch based games emerging everywhere as downloads to multiple devices and an entire new game genre will have emerged in something like 18 months.
But there is another analogous game genre emerging and it has been hidden in plain site for a while ‘ controller free gaming. In essence this is the same as touch ‘ it is a method for capturing the intent of the gamer, for gameplay. Both are new human machine interfaces, in their infancy – touch for a device with a screen close enough to touch, and motion sensing for a game on a screen that is not close enough to touch. In both cases the controller has, in effect disappeared, or at least moved inside the device.
The Nintendo Wii motion sensing controller and before that the Sony Eye Toy, are both examples of creating a device which can pick up your movements ‘ one does it because in the game you have something in your hand and the wire attached controller turns itself into that thing, so it is easy to pick up feedback ‘ the other relies on making very exaggerated movements which a Charge Couple Device (the active element of a digital camera) can collect and a processor can interpret the player’s intentions and copy them to an onscreen avatar. Both systems at present are flawed.
The Wii is limited to carrying something ‘ so how does that help you in a boxing match (where you need both hands) or a skiing game? The answer of course is that more and more equipment, for instance a board for the skiing, or a steering wheel for driving games, are required to take your analog body and turns its movements into digital copies.
The Eye Toy has the right idea but is way too inaccurate for really complex maneuvers. The Wii controller is perhaps an incredibly successful stop gap.
Microsoft at E3, this week, the gaming conference and exhibition in Los Angeles used one of the keynote sessions to describe an entirely controller free world for gaming, with something it calls Project Natal.
If you go back to the emergence, circa 2003, of films like the Incredible Hulk (there was a spate of them at the time) it was there that the foundations were laid for this type of technology through the use of laser scanning digital cameras.
To make the Hulk action, an actor made the requisite movements with key skeletal points tracked by up to 64 of these special cameras (they each tracked an elbow, knee or other joint or extremity) and this is then converted by computer into the Hulk’s lifelike movements. The locations are all precise to within one millimeter.
Lots of action in lots of movies since have used the same tricks and naturally the tools have got better and better and Project Natal has taken this type of work and asked the question ‘How do we get this cheap enough for a games console to use.’
The Sony Eye toy was also a precursor, but that only managed to watch where you put your feet in dancing games and for the casting of spells where you pretend to be Harry Potter. More sophisticated actions like kicking a ball are tougher to crack.
There are a lot of issues which still to be cracked and like most things the answer is always ‘more computer power’ and while we are fond of saying how much more powerful the Sony PS3 and the Cell chip are than the Xbox, the Xbox IBM Power chip is pretty potent on its own.
Philosophically this is an important step. Do consoles get smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper, which has sometimes been their apparent aim or do they behave in the market more and more like Arcade games did. Arcade games often used expensive equipment and had powerful computers in them and might cost $50,000 to build, and represented the future of gaming, five to 7 years off.
That is the same type of relationship that mainframes had to PCs ‘ most concepts on a $1,000 PC were invented 20 years ago on a $1 million mainframe.
Do we move to a point where to have a game played in our homes we need a dozen specialist cameras installed? Well obviously not, that’s way too expensive. What Project Natal is all about is keeping the existing pricing of consoles and their add-ons, but somehow overcoming what initially seem to be absurd technical obstacles, mostly be using more processing power.
So it uses an RGB camera (which delivers three separate color components using independent CCDs, for very accurate color image acquisitions), a depth sensor, multi-array microphone and custom processor running proprietary software, all in one device. Microsoft said that Project Natal tracks your full body movement in 3-D, while responding to spoken commands, directions and even a shift of emotion in the player’s voice.
One sensor can recognize you by looking at your face, and Microsoft says that the software interprets the spoken word so that you can ‘Call a play in a football game, and gameplayers will actually respond.’
What has us flummoxed is how you use it in real life because it moves an avatar that is there, not here. If you see a ball in a game, you are looking at the screen, not down at a ball at your feet. A system this sophisticated is presumably accurate enough to record a miskick where you might slice the ball. It would be too difficult to swing your foot while looking at the avatar’s leg and the ball on the screen instead of looking straight down.
So we would expect that this type of decision would be ‘softened’ as it always was 20 years ago on virtual reality games. In other words you swing your foot, and the computer works out you want to kick the ball, so moves either you or the ball or both so that the centre of your foot makes contact with the centre of the ball. So you either miss entirely (deliberate dummy) or hit it sweetly, with nothing in between.
Demonstrations were carried out for a game of Ricochet where a ball is bouncing off blocks which disappear when it hits them, and bounces back to the avatar. A complete novice played it well and accurately in seconds. Another demo was a paint program which used verbal commands to change colors and another where a digital character was given assignments by voice, onscreen including reacting to different tones of voice.
There were many other announcements for Xbox at E3 and rival console owners like Sony tried to match them, but in this aspect, Wii has invented a market and Microsoft has thrown down the gauntlet. Project Natal has no delivery date or price, but people watching the display seemed to think that Microsoft has solved enough of the problems that it will be this year rather than next and Microsoft has already released a software developer kit this week for videogame makers interested in designing titles to take advantage of Natal’s capabilities.
Sony followed this up showing off an engineering prototype of a motion controller which looked like a black remote control with a round plastic “glowing sphere” at the end. This bulb can then be tracked by the PlayStation EyeToy to control motion on the screen.
To be honest this shows how far behind Sony is in motion control, and having sub-millimeter accuracy for a single thing you have to hold, means that by 2010 it may have finally created a wireless version of the Wii Motion controller ‘ wow ‘ just not good enough ‘ fine for fitness games and games which require something like a gun or a tennis racquet but not for anything which needs more than one input. Sony has set it for a Spring 2010 launch.
There are 4 billion devices (handsets) which people hold in their hands, and the more promising technology has to attempt to dominate these, and that, to us, right now, means touch (see separate piece on the new Sony PSP Go). But for the much smaller universe which remains tied to a console, seeking more powerful and graphically rewarding games, then going controller free has to be a major target for all three console owners and if Sony misses this boat, it could well find its PlayStation franchise strangled out of next generation power gaming.
The other BIG adventure in console gaming is online (see separate piece on Microsoft’s Live) and Sony let Microsoft lead this by several years and is only now just catching up. If it does that in controller technology, it could be game over.