Sony patent for any object as vidgame controller
Sony has filed a patent for a system that allows any object, from a coffee mugs to a book, to be mapped and used as a controller in a video game. Rob has more over at Boing Boing Gadgets. "Sony files patent on any-object motion control"
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BLAM! Hey, it broke.
Wait. Sony just filed a patent for technology previously demonstrated by Microsoft?
And you thought Wii's were dangerous for your TV. Wait till you play Horseshoes with real horseshoes or Medal of honor X with a real rifle.
Why does the demostration guy have a goatee and long sideburns? Along with the untucked polo, khakis and loafers he looks like a total fratty.
I have an even more brilliant patent idea - 'any object' as bludgeon. Including bludgeons.
Looks like he's actually experimenting with an Acme brand super magnet. This is of course the "before" picture.
im curious as to what kind of digital burgers that george foreman grill can cook up on the floor there.
Blog of a blog of a blog. Does nobody have an original source for this patent?
From what pictures SiliconEra (the original poster in that thread of reposts) provided, it looks like they say little about how it works and more about how the user interface works. Is this a patent on a methodology for motion capture of arbitrary objects, or is it a patent on a user interface for such a system? Seems this would be easy to work around by just changing the steps necessary to configure the beast.
You can't tell me there's no prior art for this. Microsoft's NATAL aside, human-computer interface researchers have been working with similar systems for decades. I saw videos on exactly these methods ten years ago. Please tell me this is just a patent filing and it hasn't been awarded yet.
Yet another reason that software patents don't make sense. The software industry reuses everything -- just look up Design Patterns (which could easily be made into patents) -- giving everybody exclusive rights to charge others royalties for using these ideas is just holding us back. Let them monetize their products, not their ideas.
I can't believe this made it through the Patent office. Oh, wait... yes I can. There has to be thousands of pages of prior art for such a system, including Microsoft's Project Natal.
Looks like he's playing the Black Hole (circa 1979) video game with that "gun".
ANY object??
Fappita-fappita-fappita
it has to be big enough to register
http://www.instantrimshot.com/
You just have to stand closer.
Um... Nintendo Uforce?
anyone? anyone?
Are all instant replays of sporting events now the property of Sony?
"Blog of a blog of a blog."
"Sony patents purple monkey dishwashers as videogame controllers."
Hmmm, I see the potential for some really interesting 'girlfriend experience' software from Japan using this technology.
"book" and "coffee mugs" were really the only two examples you could come up with?
oh, boingboing. what happened to you? there was a time when, frankly, you'd probably still have been choosing random nouns off your desk, but they'd result in video game control interfaces like "a potentially dangerous but highly whimsical experimental sex toy" or "ice sculptures of genesis p-orridge crafted from hand-carved molds" or whatever.
it's nice that bb is popular and all, but where are the new fringe frontiers?
Did his hipster beard help make the diagram more understandable?
Fantasticpoison - ever stop to wonder if YOU are what happened? If your style of complaining without adding is what's poisoning the well? Or maybe you're just old now?
patent application # 20090158220. doesn't show up in uspto db, though.
MDH: i've submitted to bb whenever i had anything interesting to contribute, and certainly get plenty of syndication elsewhere writing on a host of issues- but back in the day, there was a much healthier original content- to- repost of stuff you might want to buy ratio.
check out how fantastically readable the old boingboing archives are as writing and as thoughtful essays... either by scrolling back through the current interface or via archive.org.
the new format is perfectly nice, but can anyone really argue a repost of a blog entry about a sony patent compares to those halcyon days?
maybe it makes me old that i can name six other websites that will try to sell me steampunk wristwatches, but wish i still knew of one that could clue me in to what was pushing the bounds of tech, media, and culture to the next level.
The patent number isn't listed anywhere, so this is just speculation...
But if this patent has already been issued, then it was almost certainly filed well before Microsoft dreamed up "Natal", much less demonstrated it.
Sony has a long history of novel input devices. Without the number we don't know when this was filed. It is possible that this patent is old enough to have expired already... (though the device in the diagram is uncannily PS3 shaped) Even if it is new, can you blame them for filing this? If they want to stay in business, they have to cover their ass in the patent department. If I were them I'd have a full time staff of the worlds best patent lawyers working around the clock to obtain as many overly broad patents as possible lest their competition beat them to it. Of course I'd also have a similar staff lobbying to get US patent law overhauled....
And what's with all the Natal hype, anyway? Either Microsoft's PR department is populated by gods, or I somehow didn't get the memo of how to get on Microsoft's payroll like everybody else. Every time they release some piece of crap, or vapor of something that presumably isn't crap they get free astroturfing, tons of coverage by major "news" networks, etc...
Yeah oddly familiar to the latest Xbox natal. Also.. since when is playing a video game with a controller such a bad thing? To reload you press x. With this thing you have to what, motion a reload on a fake rifle you bought specific for the game? Or the new sony baseball. In this game you throw a round object at your friend who then swings a tubular object at the ball. The screen tracks the ball and then tells you how far you hit it. Then you have to run from one square object to another. Repeat for 9 innings. . . I thought the point of controllers was to control things in a simple way to do tasks which may other wise require you to do difficult things. Not a fan of these new controller-less controls, stick to the paddle and stick sony.
This is all simply to acclimate us to motion-capture technology that will monitor our involuntary twitching and whatnot while sitting in our Gitmo cells being "interrogated." Or maybe when we're sitting at home watching live HD feeds of the same. Silence, proles, there's a brave new future coming. But will we be the controllers.... or the controlled?
/silly paranoid rant
You know those lightgun games? They'll be getting very dangerous in the near future...
Theremin? Not new.
Don't rip it off SONY !!
Posts #11 and #16 had me in stitches laughing, thanks guys. =)
I can't believe it... Sony just PATENTED MY BALLS!!
You just -know- I use them to control my video games.. admit it, you know you knew that.
fantasticpoison - thanks for taking that in the spirit it was intended.
If life is about connecting the dots, I still say there are more dots here than most places.
LOL @5
So you take your Hasboro tie fighter or Y-wing or whatever and zoom it around the room like you would before we had videogames and it also zooms around on your tv. now one part of me thinks this is cool and one part of me thinks no matter what they put in the game it still won't be as cool or as useful as kids imagining it like we used to. You know, when we weren't walking to school up hill both ways. In Snow. Dodging dinosaurs. Wondering what Aristotle was going to teach that day...
FantasticPoison, you said '"book" and "coffee mugs" were really the only two examples you could come up with?'
and railed against their poor imagination. But if you'd paid attention, you would see that the quote was from their source and not written by BB at all.
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