Wednesday, August 24, 2005

To Sony: Learn from the Powerglove and NES Robot!

What the? History exists for several reasons. One of which is to learn from the mistakes of others. Sony wants to sell a Wand to use with the PS and given the success of other "controllers" from past systems they are looking to take a huge loss. The Powerglove, NES Robot, SNES Scope and the running pad thing for Track and Field are just a few examples of gadgets that should have never been realeased. Not even Harry Potter can give this wand magic enough for Sony to make a profit from.
Story
Magic wand

PlayStation gamers are always looking for exciting new ways to control the onscreen action, but using a camera to track a player’s body movement has not worked reliably, admits Sony. The camera gets confused by other things in the room.

Sony’s new idea is to plug a webcam into the console, and give the gamer a handheld wand similar to a pocket flashlight. The wand has a battery, a few mouse-like buttons and several different coloured LEDs that can be switched on and off in various combinations.

By pressing the buttons and waving the wand towards the webcam, the gamer can click to shoot aliens, drag-and-drop images on screen and navigate menus.

The webcam is tuned to see only pure bright colours and map their motion in space, so it can ignore ordinary room lights. And if two people have wands with different coloured LEDs, they can play against each other.


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