Air-Wire Device Pairing for Games

I'd posted back in June about opportunities and approaches in pairing between mobile devices as smart phones and tablets proliferate. ncubeeight has teamed up with ViSSee computer vision of Switzerland to create a new US joint venture, Air-Wire, to develop paired-device infrastructure tools for game developers interested in creating more robust and immersive gaming experiences.

Through the iPhone App Store, Apple has re-invented and expanded the shareware model of the 1990s. But whereas shareware depended on free software to all with a small percentage of customers contributing toward the development costs, Apple's App Store permitted a more lucrative model, where every customer chips in a little bit, creating a boom in scalability for the independent developer community.

Now that many consumers have multiple smart devices (iPhone, iPad, Macintosh Computer, AppleTV) in their household, new multiple device interaction can be used by one consumer through wireless pairing of devices used in a single task.

The benefit of the ViSSee computer vision tools is that a mobile phone is now able to capture gestures beyond touch through input from the embedded camera, interpreted by the native device CPU. (central processing unit) Air-Wire's products will permit an iPhone to be used as a joy-stick or input mechanism for a game running on a separate device, be it another iPhone, iPad, Computer, TV or utility-connected device.

Microsoft Kinect and Nintendo Wii have have pioneered infrared-based peripherals for remote input tracking to replace the mouse, trackball or stylus (which were abstracted controls for gaming computers) with more intuitive body movement tracking based on natural body motion. Now that many "smart devices" such as mobile phones contain both a camera and CPU of their own, they can render intelligible messages to a remote computer as preprocessed input commands without needing the infrared.

Air-Wire's infrastructure tools will, for example, permit driving games to detect foot position for input commands such as braking and accelerating that the player uses to control the tablet-hosted game while using the tablet itself as a steering wheel, in turn projecting the screen of the game play through Apple's Air Play to an external screen.

As device-pairing opportunities expand with the distribution of tablet, mobile, and clothing accessory remote chips like the Jawbone "UP" wristband, more market opportunities open up for developers. And we'll have more to show you.

Comments

Far-seeing Devices for Accessibility

The German word for TV is Fernseher, meaning far-seer. I often think about that concept of the fixture of our living rooms which allows us to teleport to perspectives of other places far away. A mode of communion with others, distraction, learning. We are societally connected across the world like never before. We tend to live our lives situationally in our local communities, then at some point in our evenings we teleport our awareness into the lives of others for the snippet of time that came to be known as prime time . This slot of our societal calendars is reputed to have the broadest attention span of collective conscious focus. It came to have that moniker because of marketers seeking to have some time during the hour of evening news or entertainment that would give their messages the broadest appeal to the space-portal's "share of voice" in this communal time of focus. When terrestrial TV fragmented into multi-platform and multi-screen surface areas along with the p...

The Momentum of Openness - My Journey From Netscape User to Mozillian Contributor

(Update: Because this post is exceedingly long, I have decided to make it available as a printed book: Momentum of Openness It will remain free to read here.) Insider story behind the cover image: Mozilla's mascot derived from the name of the Mosaic browser and the trademarked name of a large mythical beast from Japanese culture which would rise from the oceans to protect mankind against peril. You may see this mythical creature in Bugzilla, or featured in popular web browsers like Chrome when they are having issues addressing your requests. I like to call it "The Mozilla" because it serves as a protector of all that's good. When I first came to the headquarters of Mozilla, I had to get a picture being bitten by the Mozilla. You'll understand why we feel so affectionately about this symbolic icon as you read the story of my journey to web development below. Foreword Shepard Fairey's Dino Working at Mozilla has been a very educational experience over the past...

“Novel view synthesis” fine in photos or grief bots perhaps, but not for science bots

I've been reading about the opportunities and perils of chatbot technologies recently. This is in part spurred by books written by Karen Hao and Sarah Wynn-Williams about industry players in the sector and in-part inspired by the recent articles on psychological peril for young people engaging with chatbot apps discussed in recent news where bots allegedly prompt humans into self-harm after humans prompt them for advice. Separately, I have also been exploring approaches to capture 3 dimensional holograms called Gaussian Splats. Gaussian Splat synthesis does not use neural network stable diffusion. The two approaches seem metaphorically similar though. One is generative, one subtractive. One helps you see the real world with greater clarity, the other can be used to create fictional images. So I've been thinking about this boundary of truth enhancing and truth abstracting. My views aren't so much about the software approaches themselves, but rather what people can and ten...

ncubeeight

Search This Blog