{"id":1469,"date":"2007-12-27T08:00:54","date_gmt":"2007-12-27T13:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1469"},"modified":"2007-12-27T08:32:15","modified_gmt":"2007-12-27T13:32:15","slug":"exceedingly-clever-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1469","title":{"rendered":"Exceedingly Clever Person"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jennifer Snow<\/a> was nice enough to send along a link to the following, which is a YouTube made by Jonny Chung Lee<\/a>, a CMU student who has developed a way to track head movements (he uses Wii parts) and use the positioning of the user’s head to adjust the camera position in a 3d scene. The upshot is that moving your head around at the computer would let you see different parts of the scene, as if your monitor was a window into<\/em> the scene. It sounds interesting, but you really have to see it in action:<\/p>\n

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Amazing. <\/p>\n

I remember there was a push for VR goggles in the early \/ mid 90’s, but the whole effort suffered from a chicken \/ egg problem. Nobody wanted to buy a toy until it had widespread support, and developers didn’t want to support it because almost nobody owned them. The ~$300 price tag didn’t help. I remember Descent<\/a> could be hacked to support the goggles. That always sounded exciting, but I wasn’t willing to pay that kind of money to see it in action. Goggles badly needed a “killer app”. It never materialized, and the idea was mostly abandoned. <\/p>\n

(Goggles had other problems as well. Aparently strapping a couple of display screens to your eyeballs was often nausea-inducing, probably due to low refresh rates. Plus, computers were just barely<\/em> fast enough to render 3d scenes to begin with, and rendering two (one for each eye) made things even choppier and less fun. Maybe the idea was doomed from the start, but maybe if it had come a little later and gotten support from a major A-list title (something like Quake II) it might have had a different fate. We’ll never know.)<\/p>\n

I like Lee’s idea*, which offers a lot of “wow” factor for a very small investment. Could something like this catch on? The best chance of success would be for one of the major consoles to embrace the idea and make it part of their platform. I’d love to see it happen on the PC, but aside from Lee’s homebrew solution I think such a system would suffer the same fate as VR Goggles: Nobody would buy it because nobody supports it because nobody owns it.<\/p>\n

Still, this is the sort of thing that really pushes gaming forward. New graphics are nice, but I’ve been content with graphics for a few years now. What I’m really interested in are new ways to interact with the game. The Wii does this with the nunchuck controller. Guitar Hero \/ Rock Band do this using their various instrument-based input devices. The PS3 sixaxis input was a good try, although it hasn’t caught on yet. (Not having tried it myself I can’t say if the idea is flawed or just their implementation.) Even DDR dance pads were an innovation in interface, even through the underlying technology was simple and obvious.<\/p>\n

The idea demonstrated in the video is more compelling to me than any of the others I just mentioned. I hope I get to see it in action someday. <\/p>\n

* Lee never claims that this is his idea, and it’s possible that he’s simply implemented what someone else suggested. In any case, he’s still a clever fellow. <\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jennifer Snow was nice enough to send along a link to the following, which is a YouTube made by Jonny Chung Lee, a CMU student who has developed a way to track head movements (he uses Wii parts) and use the positioning of the user’s head to adjust the camera position in a 3d scene. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream-cast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}