We are all familiar with the big name motion controllers (or non-controller in the case of the Kinect), but have we done all that we can do with motion control? Aiken Labs says, “No, absolutely not.” So the company did something that’s not only entirely different, but what I believe has the potential to be even better.
How could it be better though? How could it be more ground breaking than the Wii, more precise than the PS3 Move, or more innovative than the Kinect? What if I told you that it could be used with anything with a USB port or that you, as the user, get to program what each of your movements do?
Aiken Labs has quietly raised the bar on motion control with the Immersive Motion Accessory System (to be released this year). Now, imagine you have just received a box containing the IMAS and you plan on using it with your PC because you are an avid World of Warcraft player. When you open the box, you will see at least three smaller boxes or cubes inside. One of these is the IMU Transceiver. You hook up the Transceiver to your PC and install the software associated.
Next, you see the two other boxes. These are the IMU Remote Radio and the IMU Remote Sensor. The radio is a little larger than the sensor. These are what you will attach to yourself however you would like in order to use the motion control. You decide to attach the radio to your hat, and the the sensor to a stick (maybe a play sword if you have one).
Using the program that you installed, you program the radio to be your head, so when you look up, you look up in WoW, etc. Simple enough. Now realizing that there are many different actions you can do with a sword in WoW, and as a warrior, you decide that you want swinging your sword up and down is “slam,” diagonally is “heroic strike,” and that stabbing with the sword is “execute.”
Let’s say you had another sensor and a fake shield. You place the sensor on the shield and decide that pulling it in front of you is “block” and pushing the shield forward is “shield bash.”
Now say someone walks in front of you, while you are playing, or you want to hide the transmitter behind something. It doesn’t matter, because Immersive Motion is using radio waves; obstructions don’t mean anything.
While obviously it would take a bit more tweaks than that to play a game like World of Warcraft efficiently, the point is that it can be done with Aiken Labs’ Immersive Motion. You can even program it for practical reasons. For example, if you wanted to double click, you can do that by programming it whenever you move your hand in a certain way, for example.
The biggest potential flaw I see with Immersive Motion however is that it could be too customizable.
More advanced users will love it, and the less advanced may find it too frustrating. However, it comes with presets, and the representative showing us how to use it claimed that she was not very technologically savvy. We will have to see what they did to overcome the complicated nature.
What do you think? Do you see this becoming a competitor to the simple motion controls we have out now?
For more information, check out their website.
**Top left picture: Me (Rachel). The green boxes on each of the items is a sensor or radio. Bottom right picture: James Honeycutt using a radio attached to a headband to look up and down in a game.