Wii Spacial Tracking

Nintendo has revealed a new accessory for it’s Wii console called ‘MotionPlus’ which adds a new level of tracking for the Wii remotes. This accessory “…lets the Wii register the exact position, angle, and movement of the controller and translate it to a game”.

Sound familiar? For those of you who are aware of Johnny Chung Lee from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, you may remember a year ago he posted a video on YouTube with spacial head-tracking for better 3D immersion into a virtual reality environment. Watch the video below and let Mr Chung Lee explain it for you.

So is this the kind of thing that Nintendo will be introducing? I imagine it will be some variation of it considering that the sensor is an attachment for the Wii remote itself and not directly in line with the user’s line of sight with the TV.

Just one more thing to set the Wii apart from the competitors who seem so intent on copying the motion detection technologies just for the sake of it and not with any real purpose.

Cam-Trax ‘Any Object Interface’

Normally when you hear about tracking you just assume that it’s a very expensive piece of kit or a highly sophisticated algorithm. Well Cam-Trax is sophisticated but with its simplicity.

The system allows you to control anything you like by tracking an object’s colours. You will understand when you watch the video below. It seems very apt considering we are all experimenting with tracking in some form or another at the moment.

Gears of War 2: Gameplay!!

Here’s a fairly long video of the new Gears of War 2 game. Looks like some nice features have been included.

Click here for the HD version

Hail To Del.icio.us - A Treasure Trove

So I have been using Del.icio.us for a couple of days now since it was mentioned in a PPD session and I am beginning to see the advantages. It uses a tag system similar to blogging so you can see related bookmarks. Why I haven’t used it before I don’t know.

I just found a brilliant piece of interaction called Eye Gaze being used with World of Warcraft. The guy is controlling his movements with his eyes… look ma, no hands!!

Great PS2 Advert

Its kinda odd but kinda good. I like the way that they use the ‘lid’ as a metaphor for life at the end.

See… Gaming can be profound!

PONG!

As part of a series of workshops we will be doing, we were taught the basics of a programme called ‘Processing’. After a few hours of messing around with rectangles and circles and colours (that’s the correct spelling for all you yanks out there who force us to code using color!) we were tasked with creating a simple game of pong. Sounded easy… oh how wrong we were.

When the workshop was finished we were asked to complete the game as ‘homework’. I knew what needed to be done to make the game work, it was just a question of finding the right code to do it and the right way to set out that code.

It’s now 2.35am and I have finally finished it. It took me 2 hours to figure out how to get text to appear in it and then another hour to figure out where to position that within the code so that when the background was redrawn, the numbers stayed there! FRUSTRATION!

Anywho it is all done and dusted now. So click here to see my pong.

Control is with the mouse for the left hand bat, and the Up and Down arrow keys for the right.