Lessons From The Past: Motion Controllers
So as we all know, 2010 is when the future starts. Of course, we also know the future of gaming is motion sensing technology. For too long the controller has been a barrier to entry for new people to interact with their games. Finally we can see a new dawn in gaming where anyone can get involved and the only controller required is you. People, the future is now… the future is 1993 and it’s name is the Sega Activator.
Okay so maybe that was 17 years ago and it wasn’t really the future of gaming. What I’m trying to put across here is that motion sensing controllers are absolutely nothing new. The popularity of the Wii has thrown motion sensing controllers into the limelight once again. Perhaps now it is time to look back at the previous attempts to see where they went wrong. Ultimately, what hope is there for this new crop from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft?
POWER GLOVE… NOW YOU’RE PLAYING WITH POWER!
First of all we have the most well known and popular early motion controller, the power glove. Released in 1989 for the NES, the power glove allowed players to use the movements of their arm and hand to control game movements instead of a gamepad. Players would have to attach sensors to their television which allowed the NES to calculate the location of the power glove along the X, Y and Z axis (not unlike the Wii Remote and its sensor bar, which does pretty much the same thing) as well as sensors in the fingers of the glove to tell when players are flexing their fingers. This can also translate to in game actions (for example to fire simply flex your trigger finger).
You know a glove is awesome when it emits lightning
The problem this had was with accuracy. To play Super Mario, you move your hand to the left or right to move left or right and move your hand up to jump. Sounds easy and intuitive right? OK, so where do you put your hand to make Mario stand still? How do you jump to the right and quickly pull back to stop yourself from jumping right over a platform? These are the questions many (around 100,000) gamers were asking themselves as they slowly realised that general movements are nowhere near as accurate as a button. Anyone who has played Punch-Out!, Mario Kart Wii or Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the Wii will tell you.
U-FORCE? U-LIE
It seems that 1989 was a really good year for motion sensing game controllers (or a really bad year depending upon how you look at it). Not only did the power glove come out, but so did the U-Force. The U-Force was a rather large thing that looked a bit like a futuristic laptop and it used infra-red sensors to track hand movement. Unlike the Power Glove, you didn’t have to wear anything and it could track motions from both hands.
In reality the controller, which claimed to track motion, didn’t track any sort of motion what-so-ever. The marketing guys were either thinking of a different product whilst making the advertisements, or they were heavily manipulating the truth. What the U-Force did was simply map buttons from a standard NES controller to each infra-red sensor, so when you covered the sensor it would press a button. It sensed your motions in the same way a standard controller senses where your thumbs are by which button is being pressed down. So it didn’t… at all.
SEGA ACTIVATOR… YOU ARE THE CONTROLLER
4 Years later it seemed people still hadn’t learned. Sega came out with their admirable attempt, the Sega Activator. This was most certainly the most ambitious of the motion controllers developed thus far. Previous attempts had been limited to hand motion. Now with the Sega Activator, your whole body was involved in the process, or as the promotional material (and the promotional material for Project Natal) have said, YOU ARE THE CONTROLLER.
The Sega Activator employed an octagonal ring for standing, using invisible light beams which could then be broken to send a signal to the MegaDrive. Which beam was broken and how high the beam was broken changed which button was pressed. So why aren’t we still talking about this amazing technology that revolutionised gaming? Well, I’m sure given the previous tech in this article you can see a theme emerging… motion sensing gaming technology has never worked.
Playing a game with the Sega Activator was a cross between a game of twister and interpretive dance. Each one of the eight floor panels was mapped to a button, games with complicated button combinations or simply pressing more than one button at once was very, very difficult. People found rather quickly that you can press a button much quicker than you can move your body, so using the Sega Activator put you at a disadvantage when playing competitive games.
For the first time ever, you are the controller. (Oh wait wrong picture)
CAN MOTION CONTROLLERS BE DONE WELL?
From what we’ve seen in the past there are lessons that can be learned. First of all: don’t be so quick to ditch the button. The only redeeming feature of the power glove was that it had it’s own separate standard NES controller attached which made all motion controls entirely optional.
Take the Wii for example, the biggest selling feature for that game is the motion controller. However, some of the biggest games not only support gamecube/classic controls but are much easier and more accurate with them. There are so many games and movements that can be done quicker and more reliably with a button press than an abstract and inaccurate body motion.
This ties in neatly with my next point: don’t simply map actions to button presses; this just makes the action a whole lot slower. How can swinging your arm in a certain way be a good substitute for an ‘A’ button when you can press that ‘A’ button and get the same on screen reaction at least three times faster than swinging your arm.
Hopefully the advances in technology over the past 17 years will allow this new crop of motion sensing technology to actually work and revolutionize gaming. Failing that they will be good to laugh at on YouTube in a few years and talk about how amazingly dumb they all were. Also, lets look on the bright side, these were all pretty dumb and didn’t work but at least no one ever tried controlling a game using just their eyebrows… Did they Atari?
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I told you this would make a great article! Very funny
Loved eet.
It will be interesting to see where motion sensing gaming goes, the technology has definatly improved since it was tried before, but has it been enough. And more importantly have developers learned to write games that really takes advantage of the new control schemes. Nintendo’s internal developers definatly seem to have, 3rd parties less so (with exceptions of course, Flower uses motion control on the ps3 well)
ps. Great article with good history
I love that with the sega thing you had to throw both arms back to press start! That fake fighting sequence was one of the most cringe worthy ads ever. I loved it!
You may have to cut the Activator a little slack… Genius.
that activator video is hilarious. i remember seeing that in the argos catalogue and thinking i had to have it. then i realised it must be shit.