Right now, theres a lot of marketing crap and fanboy hype about the new revolution controller but there seems to be very little intelligent analysis of just how *good* it is going to be given technological and economic constraints. I've dabbled a bit in robotics applications and, from my uneducated perspective, it seems to me that the hardware simply isn't there yet for what nintendo are claiming to do.
The first problem is jitter, for less than $100, I don't think I've seen many gyros which have a noise level small enough such that there is not noticable jitter when using it. Sure, Kalman filters and the like can smooth some of it out at the expense of response rate.
Secondly, I'm wondering about speed and accuracy. They talk about being able to swing the controller like a baseball bat. Does current gyro technology allow a sampling rate that fast and with sufficient accuracy such that this is actually possible?
Also, there is the problem of drift, AFAICT, they're not using an Ascension flock-of-birds or anything similar that gives you absolute position but are using accelerometers instead. A lot of their proposed interfaces such as the FPS depend on absolute position knowledge and any drift would kill them. Is it possible to get absolute positioning from that?
Are they going to use any sort of light gun technology like the old nintendo guns? I rememeber hearing somewhere that this only worked on CRTs but not flat panel displays, does there exist a tracking system for LCD displays?
The first problem is jitter, for less than $100, I don't think I've seen many gyros which have a noise level small enough such that there is not noticable jitter when using it. Sure, Kalman filters and the like can smooth some of it out at the expense of response rate.
Secondly, I'm wondering about speed and accuracy. They talk about being able to swing the controller like a baseball bat. Does current gyro technology allow a sampling rate that fast and with sufficient accuracy such that this is actually possible?
Also, there is the problem of drift, AFAICT, they're not using an Ascension flock-of-birds or anything similar that gives you absolute position but are using accelerometers instead. A lot of their proposed interfaces such as the FPS depend on absolute position knowledge and any drift would kill them. Is it possible to get absolute positioning from that?
Are they going to use any sort of light gun technology like the old nintendo guns? I rememeber hearing somewhere that this only worked on CRTs but not flat panel displays, does there exist a tracking system for LCD displays?
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