GDC ’10: Interview with Sixense, PC Motion Control

[Editor's note: Dan's been getting his hands on all the cool toys at GDC this week. Earlier today he chatted to Josh Bays, Product Evangelist for Sixense and Scott Szyjewicz who is the Manager of their support group to talk about their PC TrueMotion controller]

Negative Gamer: Ok, so give me a rundown on this.

Josh Bays: So this is the Sixense TrueMotion dev kit. This is a wireless, magnetic tracking system motion controller. It is a magnetic base, plugged into the computer via USB, power and data. Generates a magnetic field six feet out, a twelve foot sphere, or ‘œplay area’. Anywhere within that area is where you’re going to get high fidelity, precise, motion controls.

So you can see on screen my movements of my hands on the controller are going to be reflected very precisely in the game. So my hand is now holding the crow-bar, instead of the Sixense controller. If I tilt it a little bit, or move it a little bit it’ll be reflected, it’s 1mm of position position precision and one degree of orientation.

NG: Would that be enough, say for instance, enable different kinds of pitches in a baseball game?

JB: Absolutely. It’s definitely a lot more high fidelity, a lot more precise than any consumer motion controllers.

NG: Not knowing what 1 mm equates to, what kind of translation into the average consumer terms, just how precise is it?

JB: It’s precise enough that game developers are going to be knowing exactly what you are going to be doing with your controller rather than guessing what it is based on acceleration. So because it’s not using accelerometers, it’s not using IR, it doesn’t use gyros, there’s no line of sight required, I can move around my back here and hit zombies around the corner. It’s lower latency; we have it down to around 15 milliseconds depending on some conditions. Your monitor will make a difference, but it’s going to be fast response time and it’s going to know exactly what you’re doing so there’ not going to be any waggle gaming with this controller, it’s true motion.

NG: Now that 15 millisecond latency, is that something that by release is going to be faster/tighter or is it like a hard physics based limit?

JB: It’s not inherent to the system, the magnetic field is travelling at the speed of light, right? So there’s no reason it can’t be a little bit lower than that. A lot of the latency comes from our RF link between the controllers and the base.

We’re thrilled to be working with Razer to develop the consumer version of this same tech. So their legendary RF that’s given them the Imba, the wireless mouse with the one millisecond pulling time, that’s going to make a difference and that’s going to hopefully cut it down.

NG: So this kit your using right now isn’t a Razer kit, it’s a developer kit?

JB: Yeah, this is the dev kit. It was made in-house and designed in-house. We think it’s perfectly adequate for the purpose of development, it works for gaming. But the Razer end product will look different and be performing hopefully better.

NG: So we talked earlier about this being a PC exclusive. Can you go into a bit more detail as to why?

JB: Razer is very comfortable in the PC space. They are just now moving into consoles with their headsets and their custom 360 controllers, so Razer is most comfortable there and it’s also an open platform. It’s USB so theoretically we could see it on the 360 and the PS3, but those are closed systems were we don’t know what the people at Sony and Microsoft are going to allow on there.

NG: So it’s not closed out, you just haven’t gotten to that point yet.

JB: I mean, we want it everywhere, we want it to be completely ubiquitous so we will take it wherever it’s allowed to go.

NG: The technology behind this is 100% proprietary? It’s all you guys?

JB: Yes. That’s true.

NG: How long as this been in development for?

JB: Sixense as a company has existed for about three years. So it’s been being developed that whole time.

NG: And is this the first product for Sixense?

JB: The TrueMotion system is our first product. We’re doing motion capture with the same tech and we’ve gone though many versions of our dev kit, but TrueMotion is what were working on right now.

[Editor's note: At this point Dan got to see some demonstration software showing what the Sixense controller is capable of. As you might expect this doesn't transcribe that well, so we'll let Dan better explain it when he gets the time. For now we'll pick up the interview a few minutes later on the topic of in-game uses]

NG: Possible support for MMOs? What’s the direction you guys are looking at with that? Obviously it looks like it’s geared mostly towards first person shooters or a little bit of RTS stuff as well, but have you thought about the MMO market?

Scott Szyjewicz: We’ve considered it. It’s hard to competed with a keyboard in an MMO sense because there’s so many binds. We can do a lot of gesture type stuff, but it’s hard to emulate a hundred keys. I don’t know if you know League of Legends by Riot Games? That’s like a basic MMO type game and we actually have support for that right now. We’re definitely working towards it, but for now we’re focused on FPS’ and RTS’.

NG: Gesture support is the route you would probably end up going with that?

SS: Yeah, we don’t have that many buttons. The consumer product might have more buttons but it’s not going to have that many ‘“ it’s got going to have as many as a keyboard.

NG: In the video I was watching earlier with Left 4 Dead, and obviously this is more geared towards first person shooters, but it had the ability to throw grenades in off directions, compared to where you’re looking. Now how is that going to work with games? Because I don’t think you can do that with a mouse and keyboard, so is there some sort of competitive advantage or having this interface?

SS: Definitely. We’ve been thinking about Modern Warfare 2. One of the things with that is that a lot of times when you’re throwing grenades you end up looking at the sky. Then some guy runs straight up in your face and you never even see him because you’re looking at the sky, because you’re trying to throw a grenade really far.

So we have it so you can actually throw at different heights, you can lob something really softly, you can just rocket it in there if you want. We were thinking what would be cool is if you hand your gun in your right hand ‘“ because now you have to switch away from your gun to get your grenade ‘“ you can just run by a door, flip a grenade in with your left hand. You never even have to look in the door. If you know somebody went in there you can just run by and flip a grenade. It takes half a second, rather than a five second thing where you are disarmed for part of the time.

NG: Have you gotten any negative pressure from the developers on these games who are thinking ‘œwe’re giving one set of users a competitive advantage by giving them in-game abilities that the other player’s don’t have’?

SS: The game developers have to change their engine to support it, so that takes them a little bit of time. But they’re generally pretty supportive of it because they know that how grenade throwing works now is not very realistic and it kind of breaks the realism in their games (which they are trying to make more realistic generally). Also, it can cause balancing issues, but with those guys that’s what they do; they do balancing, so they’ll figure it out.

NG: Thank you very much for your time, we appreciate it.