Haptic Battle Pong... Future of Game Interface?

An anonymous reader writes "The Sensable Phantom is a premier force-feedback haptic device and sells for a few thousand dollars now, but when that number comes down, the game industry will be jumping all over the idea of six-degree-of-freedom, precision-force-feedback video games. It looks like Haptic Battle Pong may be the first attempt at a true 6-dof, force-feedback game. It's not Quake, but maybe this is the next big thing in video games?"

sex toy?

This thing has interactive chat room sex toy written all over it.

Now I can use both hands!! :-D

Battle Pong?

I thought that was when my brother and I turned to fisticuffs after particularly gruelling sessions on the Atari...

host down :(

slashdotted already? check out more information on this here [est-kl.com]

Battle Pong?

I can see the story now:

SMALLTOWN, INDIANA (AP) -- In a tragic incident in Smalltown, IN, two Smalltown High students have been arrested after breaking 20 windows in their high school by bouching balls off of them repeatedly until they could no longer withstand the force. Preliminary reports indicates that the kids, who belonged to a group called 'The Bouncy Mafia', were wearing trenchcoats and had in their possessions two copies of 'Battle Pong'. State legislators have rushed to ban the game, calling it a grave threat to our schools and the mental state of today's youth.

</tongue firmly in cheek>

Google Mirror

Quick batman to the google mirror...

here [216.239.35.100]
or
here [est-kl.com]

hurry of these too will be /.'ed

No thank you

I'm wary of all these new 82-button controllers with orgasm mode. And [lboro.ac.uk] here's [loonygames.com] why [com.com].

haptic battle pong?

Until these things are less than $35, I will just pay the annual fee for the local recreation club and play the real ping pong game. Trust me, I get feed back, sometimes right on my nose. Damn them Indians are good with pongs. :/

Re:Exactly.

You know, there are altogether too many posts like this: "Why bother making the game more realistic, I'll just go play the real thing."

I'll tell you why. When you're playing pingpong at the rec center, can you cause the ball to catch on fire, split into three, grow to the size of a beachball, speed up, slow down, teleport, wiggle, or otherwise behave in novel ways?

No.

The point of making games more and more realistic is not to somehow asymptotically approach an exact copy of the real world. It's to give more and more reality and substance to a world where you, as the programmer, are essentially god. Tell me that isn't cool.

First 6-dof game?

It looks like Haptic Battle Pong may be the first attempt at a true 6-dof, force-feedback game.

Uhm... Descent 3?

It depends

If it's not intuitive, then it's useless. How many great games have been completely ruined by an interface that is almost impossbile to use? If I'm going to be wishing for the 'good old days' of WASD, then you can count this buried.

Remember...

To wear a cup, for those ogc'ers who have their aimbot set on crotch.

Exercising more than your mind...

Here [unc.edu] is a site that explains a little more about 6-D Haptics. Cool stuff.

Haptics could offer the magical possibility of changing the average gamer from a large cholesterol repository into a lean mass of muscle. Well, maybe not, but it's a neat idea.

Mine's better

Thats nothing compared to my classy joypad [man.ac.uk]

now when..

will hustler get a hold of one of these? can you say "attachments"? well the stylus is a little thin.

3D Modelling device

That device looks remarkably like the tools 3D developers use to model objects based off sculptures. These basically read coordinates from the real 3D space that your working on, such as a sculpture of a bust, and then places vertices in the corresponding 3D space in the computer program, Maya, Softimage, etc. These devices cost a lot because of their precision. If you wanted to get laser-mouse quality movement & precision, you'd need to buy one that cost $2000+. I imagine this Phantom device follows the same system as the 3D coord mapping device. As mentioned in the write up, these devices would definately be able to have a very full range of motion, otherwise gamers would be breaking these things a lot for any range of reasons. Looks interesting however, we shall see where this goes.

Money, Dude.

Paying a grand for a force feedback is chump change. Just sue them for ten million when it gives you carpal tunnel syndrome.

What about the nerds?

What will happen when all games are like this, and you actually have to be good at physical activity and have some degree of real-life hand-eye coordination? Then the jocks will become better at videogames, too. The last refuge nerdly superiority will be cruelly taken away. This could have major consequences, though one of them might be to get said nerds to spend more time doing actual physical activity, whether within a game or not.

/.ed

Anyone have a mirror with images?

Spurious assumption

• the game industry will be jumping all over the idea of six-degree-of-freedom, precision-force-feedback video games

Limited market, limited appeal. And it's not just little no-name games that skimp on supporting clever devices. For example, Jedi Knight 2 only added force feedback mice in the 1.3 patch, and still doesn't (officially) support force feedback joysticks. GTA3 on the PC doesn't (at the moment) even support steering wheel pedals! I can't begin to tell you how surprised and disappointed I was about that.

I'm not saying I don't like the idea, just that it will take a long, long time (5+ years) before these things take off, if they take off.

When the price comes down?

The Phantom has been around for years now, so waiting for the price to come down any further is probably futile. And somehow I don't think Pong is going to unleash massive pent-up demand sufficient to change the production costs that much.

Our PHANToM is bigger than theirs

Why play pong with one of the little desktop models when they can use one of the larger workspace 6DOF models like we use [ge.com]? Of course, they might have a little trouble getting their hands on one of these, since SensAble only made six of them.

Pong is a good start,

but this seems like the technology to make the light sabre game I've been dreaming about since I was 12.

The greater the difficulty, the more you had to be dead on with blocking laser blasts or opposing sabres (your sabre becomes thinner and more damaging with greater difficulty). The format would be arcade, much like the virtual cop style where you move from scene to scene, then hold steady and fight. Except the scenes would change frequently, and you would have the standard force abilities at your disposal.

Then, the PC version comes after the tech gets cheap enough for people to buy it, and you use the keyboard to navigate, and do the other flips, jumps, etc. Third person view, I'd think.

Anyway, thats what I do during class. That and think of how Yoda should've fought Dooku.

"It's not Quake..."

No kidding. It shows WAY more colors than Q1.

Global Domination

Forget Pong, I'm still waiting for someone to make Global Domination from the James Bond movie, "Never Say Never Again"...

"Your mind is like a parachute. If it doesn't work, you're screwed." - me

I dunnno

In my opinion, a game is a game -- and should stay there.

Feedback is nice, but if you want reality, come to reality .. Living in a virtual world, and pretending its reality, lets you lose yourself...

no offence everquest folks

Injury?

Is it possible for one of these things to hurt you...

How much force are we talking when we say force feedback ?
Depending on the direction the force is being applied, very little force could cause injury... especially over repeated use.

The Danger

The big danger behind the game is it's usage. Games like this are meant to played a bunch. Why's that a problem?

Guess what the #1 cause of Carpal Tunnel is.

It's vibration. So when you have this vibrating combined with the repetitive movements, you can easily get carpal tunnel and tendonitis very quickly.

But hey, should be fun tho'.

Haptics are extremely cool.

Wow, a Slashdot post I actually feel qualified to post about. I used to run a site on haptics when they first made their way into gaming (Force One), and actually had the chance to visit some of the people breaking ground in the industry, including Immersion and Sensable.

The Sensable people are focused on industrial and research applications of force feedback (haptics) - and while the 6dof stuff looks like fun (and it is) there's no real application in any type of gaming for something like this. Someone else made the point that this would wind up in a sex chat room - and I agree! That's the mantra I've been chanting for years now.

Immersion, on the other hand, is at the forefront of mainstream FF technology. They're behind almost every major force-enabled interface device on the mainstream market - they made everything for Logitech's FF joysticks and wheels, and even Microsoft's stuff as well (although MS bought another company for their preliminary products).

I hope Sensable's technology gets the killer mainstream app it needs.

Good Thing It's Not Quake

It's not Quake, but maybe this is the next big thing in video games?

Personally, I don't want to suffer realistic force feedback from a game like Quake. I'd rather not feel what a launched rocket feels like, thankyouverymuch.

Force Feedback Pong Preview

Here's a simulated preview of a force feedback pong simulation:

Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
etc...

Sounds a lot like Chinese water torture to me.

News Flash: You Already Can!

Haptic Battle Pong has been around for quite a while. Head down to your local YMCA and play a game of racquetball. ;) Plenty of "haptic feedback" if you get in front of a moving ball. Let's see if this "battle pong" can match that!

too flimsy

I worked with one of these on a HCI project in college and while they work very well, it didn't seem sturdy enough to work well for a gamer. If they can make it more resilient to high forces, it would be fantastic.

Modeled after sex?

From the article:
The contact between the ball and the paddle is modeled as a mass penetrating a plane with a fixed spring constant.

They used sex as the model? I hope /.ers will understand the comparison. :-P

Haptic Paddle Bong

ooo, these will be some good games.

true 6-D freedom

Think Descent [interplay.com] -- I can't find a link to the original one -- but ever since the early 90's, when iD is still doing sprite graphics w/ doom/dII, descent has already made a FULL 3-D game with 6D freedom. remember this is a couple years (2-4? not sure) before anybody had 3D accelerators. It was so ahead of its time that it never really picked up as much steam as it should have, since people tend to get motion sick (wimps) -- Personally i liked it much better than the doom series (flame me all you want, but don't do it unless you have at least beaten both games).

there was even a special controller for it, SpaceOrb 360 [makeitsimple.com]. I got one and it's terribly hard to use in real life -- so it was back to joystick w/ hat control. but the theory is good. i have heard of people getting really good on that thing. the company seem to be out of business now -- their "space orb" technology used to be marketed as a specialized input device for molecular visualization / CAD etc... but i guess that never picked up either; again, great theory, TOUGH (i mean it) learning curve.

waiting for direct mind contolled video games

All your pong

IN YEAR 2155 PONG WAR WAS BEGINING... Dan: What happen? Neel: Someone set up us the "land mine" Neel: We get signal Dan: What! Neel: Main screen turn on. Dan: It's you!! Xoltar: How are you slaves!! Xoltar: All your balls are belong to us Xoltar: You are on the way to bankruptcy Dan: What you say? Xoltar: You have no chance to profit make your time Xoltar: Ha ha ha .... Neel: Dan!! Dan: Take off every 'STYLUS'!! Dan: Vibrate 'STYLUS'. Dan: For great haptic attack!

There are devices on the market

Currently, the presence of haptics in the mass market is limited primarily to traditional non-force-feedback devices (mice, etc.) and simple single-dof feedback devices (e.g. vibrating game controllers).

This isn't entirely true. Immersion and Logitech produced the Wingman Force Feedback Mouse [immersion.com]which allowed true force feedback over 2-dimensions, with plugins to (then) current games. There also exists a full hand haptic device [immersion.com], though not for games (way too expensive) would rock the world at pong (i guess it would be more like handball with that..)

Tried one once

I had an opportunity to play with a prototype of this (or possibly a competitor's, it was a long time ago) at a trade show a few years ago. It was extremely cool. Basically, it strapped to your index finger and your thumb. It was connected to a very simplistic software demo, which basically involved stacking cubes. Each of the cubes had a different size and weight, some of them were "slippery" and some weren't. The tactile feedback was quite remarkable. And the way the unit was balanced and motored, made it feel like it part of your hand. I really hope this type of HID becomes more prevalent, so they can be manufactured and sold under the $150 price point. There's just something sexy about playing Quake and shooting by pointing at the screen and going "ptew! ptew!" :)

hey, does anyone have one of these?

Anyone who has one and wants to try it out, let me know, we have both the 3dof and the 6dof here at work, I actually write apps for it :P

Echanting storyline...

Simply a souped up version of an already existing game with lots of useless gadgets addded, all slapped together with a nicely incoherent storyline and a new flashy title. Did these guys work for Squaresoft?

How to say "we got slashdotted" in 33 words...

"Welcome to SensAble Technolgies' website. To alleviate temporary high traffic levels, we've replaced our normal home page with this text version. We apologize for any inconvenience and expect normal service to return shortly."

fufme

Hmmm... maybe fufme [fu-fme.com] could use this as their model M ... so when does the phantom model F arrive ;) Maybe they could rename it from the sensable phantom to the sensual phantom.

Haptic Painting

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has an interesting project on using Haptic Brushes for virtual painting, which is pretty neat.

They have something called Interactive Haptic Painting with 3D Virtual Brushes [unc.edu] which was also presented at Siggraph. Very cool.

Somewhat off-topic, but amusing nonetheless...

[novagate.net]
An amusing pong-oriented animation

I've used something like this...

At the Seattle robitics fair last summer they had something very similar to this connected to an SGI 0xygen machine. It was very cool. You moved the device around in 3d and it moved a ring on screen. If you tried to move it through some of the stationary stuff that was also on screen, it would resist. You could even put the ring on a hook on screen and the device would just rest there in midair. It was very cool.

History of failure

I've yet to see any periphreal that's supposed to get you "more into the game" succeed. Remember the Nintendo Power Glove? I think they sold bout 10 of them. Remember the Nintendo Virtual Boy? Of course you don't, it was the lowest selling video game system of all time cuz it made you sick after about 15 minutes of play (though I'd still like to pick one up off ebay :) Anyways, I don't see this as turning out any different than any of those. Granted, I feel like I'm missing something when I play a game without my dualshock PS2 controllers now, but this magical chair will go down the same road as those other devices methinks

remote poking device

http://www.sensable.com/haptics/products/images/se 3large.jpg + webcam + face tracking image recognition + back orifice = remote poking device

Why?

With "six-degree-of-freedom, precision-force-feedback" yada yada....why don't these folks just play real ping pong?

first attempt a 6 dof?

I had a SpaceOrb some years ago that I couldn't bear to live without for all my first-person shooter games. Basically a little ball that you push/pull/swivel for the direction you wanted to run, walk, or jump/duck. And being fully analog, meant that a hard push forward was running and a moderate push was a jog or walk. Unfortunately no product support since win98 has meant I've had to go back to a mouse now.

Re:Nice!

"It's a dark, fast moving plaque on the land from which their is no escape."

I hate those dark, fast moving plaques. I once had an "Employee of the Month" plaque chase me for five blocks before I ducked into a chinese restaurant and lost it...

:)