Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Until recently, most full-body locomotion tasks have required sophisticated and
expensive hardware configurations to track various points on the body, making these
types of interfaces only available in research laboratories or local entertainment
centers. However, there has been an explosion of less expensive, commodity hardware
devices, stemming from the video game industry that makes the ability to track either
part or all of the user's body affordable for almost anyone.
Despite this potential, these devices remain challenging to work with. They fuse
different sensing technologies together and are often not as robust in terms of accuracy
and the types of data they provide as compared to their expensive research-quality
counterparts. In this chapter, we go through the details of controllers currently at the
forefront of this video game technology, we explore how to deal with the data from
these devices including error, uncertainty and volume and how to use these devices
to create robust interfaces that let the user interact as they wish. While these low cost
commodity devices will change in time, understanding their methods of sensing and
approach to interface design will act as a basis for further improvements to virtual
environment locomotion .
In the next section, we provide details on the Nintendo Wii Remote (Wiimote),
Playstation Move, and Microsoft Kinect video game devices in terms of how they
work and the data they provide.
16.2 Video Game Motion Controllers
The notion of a video game motion controller is a relatively new term, since, until
recently, video game controllers solely used buttons and digital or analog controllers
that did not sense anything about the user's body [ 9 ]. One reason for not havingmotion
sensing in the video game industrywas a lack of low-cost sensing technologies. Many
of these technologies, such as electromagnetic, inertial and vision-based tracking
systems have been available for many years in the virtual and augmented reality
communities [ 2 , 18 , 24 ] but their cost (e.g., tens of thousands of dollars) made it
prohibitive for the majority of users. However, as computational power has increased
and sensing technologies have become available at the commodity level, the video
game motion controller became viable.
As of today, the three most common video game motion controllers are the
Nintendo Wiimote, Playstation Move and Microsoft Kinect. Each of these devices
has unique characteristics that make them interesting to examine because, although
they use different sensing technology configurations, they all provide data which
tells us something about where someone is or how they are moving in 3D physical
space. Of course, in the future we expect that other input devices will be developed
that will improve upon the video game motion controllers we discuss in this chapter.
These improvements will likely come from two sources, current motion sensing
technologies that are too expensive today for commodity use (e.g., sophisticated
multi-camera motion capture systems, mechanical trackers associated with various
haptic technologies, body sensor networks), and new research results that will take
 
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