Mind Numbing New Interface

Mind-Numbing New Interface Technologies

At first it didn't look like much: Dr. Richard Marks, who helped create Sony's awesome Eye-Toy peripheral, walked us through some PowerPoint slides talking about different game interfaces. Then things got crazy.

Game interfaces often get the shaft. Developers invest tons in graphics or sound or physics, but nobody ever invests tons of time into the control scheme. Often people don't even really think about it. Game controllers are ubiquitous. You push a button, and stuff happens. But the interface is literally a player's connection to the game: it's where the action happens.

And after a couple decades of stagnation (game pads are basically the same as they were for the NES, save for more buttons) we're finally on the verge of some crazy new technologies for how people interact with games. The Eye-Toy is leading the way, proving that there's an opportunity for new concepts to hit mainstream.


This was all just lip-service until Dr. Marks started firing up demos and showing what new technology was on the horizon. Here's what's coming up, including some cool stuff that I never imagined was so close to reality:

Head Tracking: Head-tracking works with the current Eye-Toy, and it's been successfully applied to Eye-Toy: AntiGrav, where you'd move your head and arms to steer a snowboarder. But there are other applications, as well. One demo was of a 3D instant replay: Dr. Marks brought up a freeze-frame of a soccer match. Then, as he moved his head back and forth, the scene rotated accordingly, showing the action from multiple angles like in The Matrix and swinging the camera around with his head in real-time.

This technology could be very cool when applied to first-person shooters. Imagine that you creep up to the corner of an alley. Then, when you want to peek around the corner, instead of strafing your character over you could just move your head and literally 'peek.' Dr. Marks showed a demo of a street scene where he moved his head to look down a street and then moved it back to duck around cover as the bullets flew.

Unfortunately, head-tracking technology uses up about 20% of the CPU with the current generation of game platforms. No first-person game developer would want to do that. But in he next generation of hardware, the processors are many times more powerful and the drain on system resources is much more trivial. Expect to see some cool things!