Paul Lorsbach
May 9, 2007
ECE 395 – Final Write-up
Augmented Reality Gaming Controller
IMPETUS:
The inspiration for this project came out of few different ideas. One angle was
the want to fill a technological void in physical sports. Much of the core equipment lacks
any sort of electronic augmentation. Bats are still just wooden bats, baseball gloves
leather, footballs pigskin, etc. While there are good reasons to keep their development
conservative in the professional arena, there is still a world to explore here.
Guitar Hero was an inspiration for this project as well. What struck me about the
model of Guitar Hero (and indeed in almost every game) is how the computer games can
convolute, handicap, or help the user’s experience of some activity, in this case playing
guitar. Playing “guitar” through guitar hero affords the user skill that would otherwise
take years to garner. Of course playing a video game can’t make up for actual talent but
even still there’s almost a twisted parallel community of expert users that come out of
such a game. But despite the fact that there can be such a huge breadth of skill, brand
new players can still jump on a song and play next to an expert (one playing the bass part
the other guitar, for example) and both have a challenging fun experience. At a
beginning level a player will only have a few buttons to hit and they will come less often,
whereas an expert player will have to nail multiple button combinations at extremely fast
rates. But both are playing the same song at the same time. So this game effectively lets
you “play guitar” at the same skill level despite your actual skill level.
The casual sports world could benefit from this type of normalization as well. It’s
simply not fun to play a game of basketball with someone who is ten times better than
you or to play baseball with someone who can barely swing the bat. If this videogame
paradigm could be implemented in sports then even a 5 year old could have a competitive
game with a professional.
Coming at this from a different angle was the Nintendo Wii controller. Finally a
gaming controller has brought physical movement and gestures to the video game world.
While it is a breath of fresh air to play a game by swinging your arms around, we are still
a long way away from saying you can get a good workout from playing video games. A
ball and chain that video games have is that they almost exclusively use visuals for the
game feedback. You can’t play a video game with anything other than a monitor or TV.
But it is of course hard to bring a TV to a football field and to play a physical game when
you have to constantly stare at one immobile spot. Tactile and audio feedback, however,
could adequately clue the user into the digital state of the game while leaving their
visuals to keep track of the physical state.
DESIGN:
Position - The gaming controller, first of all, has to have a positioning system. I tossed
around and researched a few different ideas. Ultrasonics are good because of their
precision but they do not scale well and require sensors to be implanted on the field.
