Mad Genius Controllers - CES 2014
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,319 words · ~6 min read
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Linus Tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by nc.com your source for
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great technology selection and service along with Corsair memory and Western
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Digital hey guys we're here at the nurata booth with something that I almost walked right past this is mad
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genius and their amazing amazing controller so what can you tell me about
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it uh what we have is a motion controller uh except it's based on
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absolute positioning where most controllers are based on acceleration
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and what this does is it lets us know where the player is in the room with an
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accuracy of 100th of an inch and we can break the controller in half so we can
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track each of their hands independently uh so that we can track things like if
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the player shoots a bow or does other things we can track each side of it
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separately um and we can track that with the accuracy of 100th of an inch which
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allows the player to aim with absolute precision and no sensor drift we can get
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that last little bit when they zoom in on the target we can see that motion and
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the tracking is enough that we can tell the difference between if the player is
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breathing or if they're not uh for some really tight shots it's better to hold
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your breath just like it is with an actual bow or an actual gun it it adds a
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different feel to the game because it it becomes about how well can you aim how
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well can you move it's not just putting the crosshairs on something and pushing
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a button um the uh tracking is also
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optimized for an area about 8 ft wide about 12T deep now so the player can
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move anywhere in that area in front of the TV and what we do is we link that to
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the character movement of the game so as the player moves around the character
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moves with them so they can duck behind an object literally step to the side to
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step out shoot somebody and then step back and hide again while they reload
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and it adds a completely different feel to the game if they need to move further
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all of the scks and buttons are still active so we haven't removed any controls that they're used to we just
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add the motion if they wanted and if they don't want the motion they put the
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two halves back together and they have a standard controller like they always
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have uh the the two halves putting it back together and taking apart those are
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really easy to do because it's based on magnets and something you told me
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earlier actually was because of how absolute the positioning is actually to
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to you can tell because while you're holding it there's a little bit of drift
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because your body is naturally moving in tiny amounts and it's that accurate that
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if sometime if you if you put it down and point at the screen it will be exact
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which is pretty interesting now another thing we talked about when you brought up if you pulled it apart and went like
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this uh you could be shooting a bow you can make custom controls for this so how
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would you go about doing that um we have a motion editor and you can pull that up
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and you can edit the motion design that we've done or you can create your own
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and that's how the Motions for the controller can be customized to the game
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and this is done without any hardware modification to the console and without
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any additional software in the console so it can go back on any console and
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play existing games it's backwards compatible with the games that are
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already out there because you don't need an additional software solution to make
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the game work so we've gone as far back as as PS1 games I've done Gran Turismo
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on a PS1 um and it works just fine with
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that we've actually gone as far back as is the original Castle Wolfenstein and
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which looks kind of clunky blocky now but you can link into anything and you
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know with a lot of the new uh motion controllers that are coming out they
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have an API that the game developer needs to write to for it to work and I
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wanted this to work right out of the box so you can pull it out of the box play
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the games you already have and you know in the future it would be great if game
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developers would write for it but if not you still have your entire library that
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you can play differently and I think that's really cool because there's a lot of Technologies coming out lately uh
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like tracking that we've seen and Oculus and all these other things that while
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they're awesome they require a lot of development on the game maker side and
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with all these Technologies coming out it's going to be hard for people to properly develop for everything that's
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available to them so when a device like this comes out and uh the hackers in the
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community can just come out and make their own profiles upload them to the cloud and allow you to download them
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yourselves it's a lot easier for game makers because while if if they want to
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they can prepackage it or they can add it later really easily or if they have
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someone really enthusiastic in their community that their nowhere is already going to make a really good profile they
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can just rely on that which is really cool uh what's your favorite part about this device or what is anything you feel
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like we've left out so far um there's
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one thing that it's difficult to get through when you're watching it but it's something that really happens when you
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play is when you have that level of control uh something as simple as
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shifting your weight left and right and the character moves with you there's a connection that that makes with your
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brain and everybody who does it the first time there's this wow effect with
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it because you're like oh I'm connected into it and it's little things like that
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that change the gaming experience and so this isn't necessarily about counting
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milliseconds or a competitive Advantage it's about feeling a little more
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connected with the game this controller is awesome there's a billion different things you can do with it I'm really
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excited for how easily and seamlessly it integrates with games they're going to
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be having a Kickstarter in a while I think she said somewhere around April or February but don't quote me on that go
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to their website um look up mad genius you'll find it and there's an input
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field for your email if you put your email in there they will email you when their Kickstarter is live this is
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definitely something I'm going to be getting behind as I love different ways of interacting with computers or cons or
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whatever if you can interact with it differently I'm all over it I was all over oia I was all over Oculus all this
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kind of stuff so I'm super excited for this device thank you for watching this
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