Rumors have been flying over the past few weeks about Microsoft’s plans for adding motion control to the Xbox 360 platform.

First, MTV broke news about the development of the new motion controller that:

…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.

8bit Joystick followed up with a piece stating that Microsoft was licensing Gryation’s technology from Movea:

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.

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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.

Via GigaOM.

Nokia Research Center’s MARA project isn’t the only research project incorporating GPS, motion sensors and mapping applications.

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.

Video of the system in action below:

Enkin from Enkin on Vimeo.

Nokia Research Center Mobile Augmented Reality Applications (MARA) concept is a fascinating look at where motion sensing in the mobile platform can go.

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.

GestureTek announced some significant new initiatives in its mobile phone business this week at CTIA.

As we’ve discussed in the past, GestureTek’s approach to motion revolves around optical sensing, and in the mobile arena the company leverages the built-in cameras found in nearly every phone today to provide motion sensing without any additional hardware requirements (beyond sufficient memory and processor power).

The new announcements at CTIA include:

* A gesture-based photo viewing application for Windows Mobile devices: with this system installed, users can select photos on their Windows Mobile smart phone and use zoom, pan and otherwise navigate the photo using simple gestures. This system is available to carriers now.
* A gesture-enabled GPS navigation system: currently available in Japan (where NTT DoCoMo is a major customer) and available now for other carriers, this system lets users manipulate mapping/navigation applications with gestures rather than key entries.
* A still-under-development gesture-based Web browsing platform: GestureTek announced that they are working with several software vendors to incorporate GestureTek’s motion sensing technology into mobile device Web browsers, allowing users to zoom in and out and navigate Web pages using only motion.
* A text messaging (and text entry) system under development with Iota Wireless: this system is designed to speed up the entry of text messages (and potentially any text entry) on phones without QWERTY keypads, by allowing users to scroll through predictive text entries (using a number pad) quickly by simply tilting the device in the direction of the desired letter or word. Video below:

All of these applications are a natural evolution of where GestureTek (and motion on the mobile device in general) has been going — moving beyond games to a more general phone interface. The interesting thing here is that GestureTek is, to a degree, laying down the gauntlet to Apple’s iPhone and its almost uncountable number of followers in the “touch” UI space — phones with touch-based UIs were thick on the ground at CTIA this week, with just about every major manufacturer and carrier laying out a touch strategy. GestureTek described their announcements as “iPhone-like Functionality With a Touch-Free Interface”, and there’s a lot to be said for the lower BOM that GestureTek’s approach offers relative to touch.

That said, we’re still in the early days of mobile device interface when it comes to moving beyond the “D-pad” type interfaces and the roles of motion vs. touch are still up in the air. Apple, for example, despite all the emphasis on touch, has clearly hedged its bets and utilized both systems. This is an area we’re going to be exploring more — if you’ve got an opinion, we’d love to hear it.

Full press release from GestureTek is below the jump: Continue Reading �