Camspace (goodbye joystick?)

What do you think about it?
http://www.camspace.com/

Cool! But I don't think it'll actually replace the joystick. Plus joystick have been the staple controller for everything else in the whole world for eons, yet for the PC they seem strangely absent. A cool new technology, which I'm sure someone will be along in a while describing as "a gimmick" is going to have one rough time penetrating the market.

Besides most PC gamers are loners sitting in the dark playing DOOM3, so it wouldn't really work, because much like the Eyetoy, I'm fairly certain it requires quite a lot of ambient light.

It's certainly an idea with a future (not really a new one). But, as Flamey says, it does require oodles of light. Perhaps when we all have webcams with infra-red LEDs built in. They certainly are aiming it in the right direction, by keeping it generalised.

I disagree that most PC gamers play DOOM3 in the dark. But, I agree that gameplay doesn't usually result in having lots of lights on.

This is pretty cool!!

It could get around the need for light quite easily using neon colors and a low power "black" light instead.

Really cool indeed, was thinking myself to build something like this one day to try and lock stuff in front of the webcam and trace it's movement.

A webcam is more standard on a home PC then a Wii controller and a lot cheaper too, so why not make use of something most people already have or is really cheap to get to control something in a game.

This will not replace the joystick at all, but it can be cool for games made for this way of control.

It is nice but I do wonder how much CPU overhead that takes up. They should get it working with Xbox 360/PS3 and sell it for oodles, suddenly the Wiimote looks a bit rubbish.

The stand or fall of this though is not just "Is it Cool?" but "Does it work better than existing controllers?". I'm not so sure about that right now, it works yes, but works well, like for example better than an existing steering wheel or controller etc?

Darkheart

Not much actually: it's the same concept behind motion tracking for webcams (for 3D avatars and props on your face) which has been available for a lot of time.

Besides the ambient light problem mentioned by FlameDuck (playing with the eyetoy with artificial light is often impossible, but tracking softwares for webcams are usually less demanding and here you use an uniformly colored object), I also wonder how well it reacts to depth: the demo only shows movement on two axis most of the time, and an airplane where he moved his hands forward and backward for the pitch (which is quite different from tilting a joystick).


That's usually the biggest obstacle for PC controllers. Since consoles already ship with a controller, it is a standard. However, PC's usually ship with mouse and keyboard only, and even though many of us have a webcam, developers don't want to limit their market (the demonstration is that even joysticks have disappeared during years, and games making good use of them altogether).

Great technology. I particularly like the two finger point and trigger action for the FPS demo at the end. Imagine the amount of fun games you could create if we had a BlitzMax SDK version ?!
Brucey, drop whatever you're doing and get to it (!)

The best part is, you can easily obtain/create a multitude of peripherals to use alongiside this tech. And I can already imagine some whacky YouTube vids appearing

I would not mind using this for controlling aspects of windows.
Essentially like a touch-screen emulation

Thanks for the link. I'll spread the word as it were

I wrote something similar to this using the Webcam lib for B3D, it was a little too slow for real use but it could spot my girlfriends nipples pretty accur.. I mean... it would find a persons head very easily.

these are very early test shots, i don't think i have the source anymore, but Panno's webcam lib was the main staple. :-)

That reminds me, I was supposed to rewrite this thing!





It wouldn't interface as an actual controller, although i did allow it to control a coupleo f my blitz games :-)

[edit]

Found it! but my current cam seems crap with it.

Reccomend a decent cam anyone? i'm kind of fed up of having naff cams.

FlameDuck, if you preffer to play Doom3 in the dark ;) , maybe you can use this:

http://emotiv.com/

For playing in the dark it's even better. Get a couple of LEDs and put them on something, the rest of the room is dark so the LEDs will stick out like crazy.

Clever.

haha, played some more!





the camera is awful and the lighting was abysmal, so i'm amazed at how much info you can pull out of an image.

Wooo use your hand as A gun in Gta :D

use paper weel in GTA

Yep i signed up for beta.. this is interesting indeed.

think of commanding your forces on a 46 inc tv with 1080p :D

Interesting :D, is it only 2d? or it can detect inclination and depth?. Finally someone could make an rpg with realtime sword fighting in it :D'

Christian223, detects rotation and depth