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.

All of the components used in the Darwin are available off-the-shelf. Motus is negotiating and finalizing contracts for the components. “We are very good with the hardware,” Mahajan says. Their firmware, called Graffiti, drives the hardware.

Mahajan says that Graffiti promises to offer the same thing to motion programmers that C and C++ did to software developers, which is to say, take the process of programming out of machine language and made it more developer-friendly by giving motion control an object-oriented programming model.
“Before Graffiti, you needed to have a person with math skills, and a person with physics skills – or both skills in one person who knew programming — to develop an application,” Mahajan says. “Graffiti lets a lay developer put together an application without having to know both physics and math.”
At the moment, Motus’s Graffiti is available only to larger studios. “That is due to the limited resources we have available right now to support it,” Mahajan explains.
“As we expand, it will be available to other developers,” he promises.

Look for the Darwin to have a price-point competitive with motion enabled games. Mahajan says it will likely be in the $79 to $99 range when it comes on the market.

Motus currently is facing a challenge different than most companies face – its stuff got stolen. Yep, robbed.
“That really set us back,” says Mahajan. The thieves took all sorts of motion gaming equipment – including the company’s computers and Wiis and similar motion gaming equipment that was being used for comparison purposes. Authorities say they believe it was a random break-in where the robbers got lucky and hit a high-tech jackpot.

Meantime, they have given up on recovering any of the stolen products. Gone, along with the experimental units, was the hardware housing the company’s website. Fortunately, the sites are back up and running now, and we’re looking forward to testing the Darwin as soon as we can.