Kodak announced their new Kodak Theater HD Player on Friday. In many ways this new product seems to line up as a “me too” in the digital media player ecosystem — support for 720p HDMI output, photo sharing, music sharing, etc. It does have a nice lineup of partners for content (including Kodak’s own photo sharing, Flickr, YouTube and RadioTime), but not enough to make it stand out from the Apple TVs, Roku NetFlix boxes and Vudus of the world.
What is new and different however, is the remote control. Kodak isn’t too forthcoming with the details, saying only:
Just point and play—the unique pointer remote makes it simple to navigate menus
Breakthrough user interface designed specifically for an HDTV
But the inference is clear — the system uses a motion sensing “pointer” remote to interact with the system’s onscreen interface. No more clumsy up/down/left/right D-pad maneuvers to get to your content - a clear winner in our book.
Sony Ericsson announced today a new mobile phone optimized for gamers and utilizing motion sensing.
The F305 is a quad band GSM/EDGE phone isn’t S-E’s first phone with accelerometers built-in, but it is the first in the company’s gaming phone line to incorporate motion control. Several games will be included with the phone (due to launch in Europe in Q3), including bowling and bass fishing, and more will be available for download after the phone’s debut.
The F305 even includes some very familiar-looking (to those who are part of the playstation generation) dedicated gaming buttons.
We expect to see a lot of similar announcements in the near future — between the success of the Wii (and rumors of motion control being added to the Xbox 360 and enhanced in the PS3) and the absolutely huge reception given to the motion sensing aspects of the iPhone, we expect that a lot of manufacturers will soon follow suit.
UPDATE: According to some recent articles, S-E signed a deal with GestureTek Mobile back in May. S-E hasn’t specified in its announcement whether the F305 uses accelerometers or optical motion sensing. Given this earlier deal, it could well be optical in this relatively low cost phone. More when we talk to GestureTek.
The New York Times has an excellent article in its “Basics” section describing motion sensors and their use in a variety of consumer applications. Well worth the read , you can find it here
…isn’t much different in functionality or design from Nintendo’s Wii remote, but comes with four face buttons, an analog stick and microphone. There are also plans for the controller to interact with the Xbox Live Vision Camera, the source said.
Microsoft is rumored to have licensed patents from Gyration and are using them to develop their motion sensing Wiimote controller. Legally Microsoft is not ripping off Nintendo but rather licensing the technology from the same place that Nintendo got it. For an example the Guitar Hero and Rockband controllers both use the same patent that is owned by Konami that they developed for Guitar Freaks.
Today, Kotaku follows up on this story with a flat denial from Gyration that their technology is being adopted by Microsoft, and some conjecture that Motus is actually the source, something Motus’ Chairman Satayan Mahajan neither confirms nor denies:
Motus has a previous relationship with Microsoft, too. Its iClub technology encompasses motion analysis and capture, and they’ve been at that for nearly five years now. The iClub technology was used in Microsoft’s Links golf title in 2005. Is Motus continuing to work together with Microsoft?
“I couldn’t tell you that,” Mahajan said. “I would love to tell you that, but I can’t.”
We don’t have any insider knowledge on who Microsoft may be leveraging for an Xbox 360 motion controller, nor any official confirmation that they’re doing so — but it seems like a beyond solid bit of conjecture that they’re doing so, sooner or later. When motion control comes to the Xbox 360, the hardcore gamers won’t have any reason to look down on motion control.
We had the chance recently to speak with Satayan Mahajan, chairman of Motus Corp. and CEO of Motus Games, to talk about the company’s forthcoming motion-sensing Darwin game controller.
Mahajan says the Darwin will be out sometime in Q4 of 2008 or Q1 of 2009 — the uncertainty isn’t entirely the company’s fault, as you’ll see as you read on.
The Darwin is a Wii-like game controller with some major differences. Its family tree traces back to the iClub – a serious gaming tool meant to help golfers and professional baseball players improve their swing and their game.
Motus sees its Darwin as a definite step up the evolutionary ladder from the Wii. Mahajan says that while the Wii calculates motion with a 200-300 millisecond delay, the Darwin can figure its position in under 30 milliseconds.
Mahajan does not knock the Wii – in fact, he is grateful for it. “They made the mobile gaming space,” he says. But he figures they have a better mousetrap in the Darwin. Darwin’s family tree is a proven commodity.
The iClub is used by about half of the Top 100 teaching pros on the professional golf tour to analyze players’ swings. Professional and semi-pro baseball players use the company’s similar Body Motion vest system to capture precise motions of their hitting stroke. “An athlete putting or pitching a ball has to see the motion instantly to get proper bio-feedback,” Mahajan notes.
Darwin will be a consumer version of the iClub and will be marketed as a fast-reacting motion game. “It will map gestures to a PC or a console,” Mahajan explains. Darwin has six degrees of freedom – three rotational and three translating dimension.
“It captures motion in real time,” Mahajan emphasizes. That 30-milisecond delay is 10 times faster than consumer product out there right now. “It ‘knows’ what direction you are facing and how you are moving in space. It knows how you move relative to what you are doing,” he explains. He refers to it as a kind of personalized GPS (global positioning system).
The company claims that its wireless controller is the only product on the market to be a self-contained unit with six degrees of freedom.
The New York Times has an interesting article today about the audience for Wii games. The bottom line is that the console is appealing to a large number of people beyond the hardcore gamers who seem to be making up the PS3 and Xbox 360 markets. That’s great on one level — it gets Ninentdos consoles in homes where previous consoles wouldn’t have made it, and of course it shows the broad demographic appeal of the easy-to-use motion control system that Wii offers.
A downside, according to the article, however, is that these people aren’t necessarily onboard the “must have the latest and greatest shiny new game” mindset that characterizes other console owners. The result is that while more people are buying Wii consoles than are buying the other systems, they aren’t necessarily buying more games. Key quote from the article:
The problem is that, in marketing the Wii, Nintendo cast a wide net and caught more than the big fish. The Wii’s innovative motion-sensitive controller and a price lower than the rival machines appeal to a broader audience than the traditional market of young male hard-core gamers. Younger children, women and older consumers, who historically have not been sought by the video-game industry, have discovered video games through the Wii — just not that many of them.
These new gamers are content with the games they have, often going no further than the Wii Sports game that comes with the machine. They don’t buy new games with the fervor of a traditional gamer who is constantly seeking new stimulation.
Not mentioned in the article, but something to keep in mind, is also the fact that many developers, unused to motion control, find that developing Wii games isn’t an easy task — an issue that will no doubt be overcome in short order.
We think that the key thing to keep in mind here is that this isn’t any reflection on the appeal of motion control itself. In making the Wii cheaper than its competitors (especially considering the increased BOM of adding in two motion sensing controllers), Nintendo skimped on the graphics. The Wii isn’t optimized for HDTVs, it can’t play back Blu-ray discs like the PS3 can, and its graphics really don’t match up side-by-side with other consoles in any way, shape or form.
We suspect that if the Wii matched the other consoles in horsepower this would be a non-issue — with the same lifelike graphics PLUS motion control, the Wii would probably be dominating all aspects of console gaming sales.
Samsung was in the news today with word of a patent application for a gesture-based mobile phone interface.
The system uses the phone’s camera (ala GestureTek) to track hand motions as an interface alternative to the now (almost) ubiquitous touchscreen. As the picture below shows, Samsung has defined a number of specific hand gestures to activate pointers, perform mouse clicks and switch through and among layers on the screen.
Two interesting things come to mind as we look at this. First — and we haven’t seen the patent application itself yet — is where this patent might fit into the constellation of motion control patents already out there. We suspect that more than one company may feel this butts up against some existing IP.
Second, the gestures themselves seem to be a bit elaborate. One knock against motion control that we’ve heard time and time again — from folks not familiar with the technology — is ” won’t it be too hard for my mom/grandma/kids/etc. to use”. We’ve found that most motion controlled applications are easier to use than traditional interfaces (think about all the senior centers with Wiis), but this system seems like it will require more than just intuitive “pointing” to operate.
Obviously this is all well before even pre-production, but we’ll be keeping an eye out here to see what the final product (if any) is going to look like.
Enkin is a project designed by Rafael Spring and Max Braun from Universitat Koblenz-Landau, and submitted by the pair for the first round of Google’s Android Developer Challenge.
Their description of the project pretty much sums it all up:
“Enkin” introduces a new handheld navigation concept. It displays location-based content in a unique way that bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations. It combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for mobile devices.
The system combines (externally at the moment) a 3 axis accelerometer, GPS and a compass with a S60 Nokia handset. These sensors work with the phones camera to provide a virtual reality (augmented reality, in Nokia’s words) overlay to whatever the camera is pointing at. The display on the phone provides “annotation” about real world objects — map data, URLs, etc. — and overlays it on the screen as text and (in some cases) clickable URLs that will open in the phone’s browser.
As mentioned, this is still in the labs, and the sensor pack is external, but the sensor part of this equation is rapidly getting integrated into phones (at least the GPS and accelerometers are). Probably the hardest part here will be the software integration and the development of the metadata to tie into existing mapping databases.
We see the combination of motion sensing and GPS becoming a BIG thing in the near future. The end game here, we believe, are the augmented reality applications like the one Nokia is showing — imagine touring a new city and incorporating GPS position and accelerometer-based orientation to help you “see” what’s around you. When you’re near (and looking at) a historic building, you see just why that building is historically significant; when you’re looking at a restaurant you’ll pull up the menu, the Zagat rating and the Yelp! reviews.
In the shorter term, however, we’re confident that motion sensing will be increasingly built into GPS devices and GPS-enabled devices (like mobile phones) with a simpler dead reckoning functionality designed to augment GPS when and where it doesn’t work well (inside buildings, underground, in center city areas where skyscrapers block the satellite “view”). We’ll have an interview up later this week with Sensor Platforms Inc. where they discuss their forthcoming products in this arena.
This EE Times article is worth a read to get a temperature check on the current analyst community feelings on where motion sensing component (i.e., accelerometer) pricing is today and where it needs to be to become a mass market technology.
The article quotes analysts from ABI Research and Bourne Research on the topic:
ABI Research notes that MEMS accelerometer vendors such as Analog Devices Inc. (Norwood, Mass.) and STMicroelectronics NV (Geneva) cashed in on the success of the Wii and the iPhone. But “true mass-market traction” of the devices will only begin when individual unit prices fall below $1, ABI predicts.
ABI senior analyst Douglas McEuen forecasts that MEMS accelerometers will break the $1 barrier in 2010.
Bourne said unit prices on tri-axis accelerometers currently hover around $1.50 and are “pushing very hard” to cross the $1 threshold. “I do believe we are experiencing a slow integration of sensors into everything-with ’slow’ being the operative word,” she said.
We’d agree that this process (the integration of motion sensors into everyday items) isn’t going to be an overnight one… but for markets where the usefulness of the technology is pretty obvious (such as gaming) the move is happening pretty fast. Considering the number of $70 kid-oriented motion sensing gaming systems announced at the Toy Fair earlier this year, we’d argue that mainstream is here now.
Add to that software-only approaches like GestureTek’s and you can see that the barriers to integrating motion sensing are low and getting lower.
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