Get up and play

Introduced as ‘the new magic wands’, movement-based interfaces for Playstation and X-box are meant to add an extra dimension to gaming. But they could be cool scientific tools as well.

The entertainment pages of ‘De Pers’ newspaper hail the new wave of movement-based interfaces. Imitating Nintendo’s Wii, Microsoft and Sony have both introduced new interfaces aimed at getting gamers more physically involved.

But while the interfaces are there, the games are still missing, ‘De Pers’ reports. Gaming researcher, Dr Rafael Bidarra (Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences) agrees. Games on the movement-based Wii are very different from those on the X-box or Playstation, he points out. “Wii-games were good because they specialised in movement, untroubled by the simple and even childish graphics. Microsoft and Sony meanwhile focussed on graphical quality. These designers have no idea what to do with movement; they will have to turn around their way of thinking.” Bidarra estimates it will take about two years before well-balanced, movement-based games hit the market.

Bidarra’s colleague, postdoctoral researcher Dr Gerwin de Haan (EEMCS), makes a distinction between the movement interfaces. “The Wii interface and that of the Playstation are not very innovative. They’ve only made a known technology smaller and more affordable. The X-box however uses a three-dimensional scanner called Kinect, which does away with the need for a controlling device.” In fact, the users themselves become the device. De Haan foresees innovative applications, such as window-shoppers controlling displays situated on the other side of the glass, surgeons operating on patients without actually touching them or scientists using the Kinect as a new sensor.
The Wii interface has already been converted into a scientific instrument. PhD student Rolf Hut, and colleagues at the faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, have attached the Wii to the side of a floating basin filled with water that is used for measuring evaporation. In the middle of the basin they’ve placed a bobber that emits an infrared signal, just like the bar that must be placed at the top of the screen when playing Wii games at home. The Wii continually receives infrared signals and then forwards them to the computer that calculates the Wii’s position. In this specific experimental set-up, it calculated the position of the bobber, which dropped as water evaporated. “Any nerd can do that with a Bluetooth adapter”, Hut told ‘Delta’ last year. “This type of communication is easy to hack.”
And that is exactly what De Haan is waiting for in the case of Kinect. Either Microsoft should allow access to the sensor’s data, or the system should be hacked to make it accessible for scientific applications. For now, though, not even its resolution or speed is known.