Stanford Details

Overall Rationale:
At SGMs we've been questioned about what our overall goal is with our product. Is it superior performance or superior immersion, both, or something else? As of today, we feel that keyboard/mouse represents the most optimal performance and it will be impossible to surpass this with a handheld device. One area where we can surely improve the gaming experience is immersion, based on our user findings. This fact, along with the given constraints, is we've chosen a gun controller.

Our goal of this product is to enhance gaming experience through immersion. We still believe performance is very important, but we have concluded that we will not be able to out-perform existing technologies. We don't think it is useful to test our product against a keyboard/mouse; we will only rediscover the obvious. Our main goal is to to make a controller that is more immersive than existing mainstream controllers, and higher performance than existing gun-like controllers. We will not achieve higher performance through aiming, but through input layout and ergonomics. Our aiming will be as good as the current state-of-the-art in the market.

Wii:
The advantage of playing the Wii version on the PC is that it is completely functional, allows for point and shoot aiming, compensates for turning, and moves the crosshair on the screen. This is a completely suitable environment for testing and demoing. It seems to us that the airmouse or wimote/touchpad combo is just a work-around to overcome the turning issue on the PC version of the game.

Recoil:
For recoil, we have ruled out a solenoid based system, as the power requirements are too large. Our current plan, which we are in the process of implementing, is to use a cam shaft system powered by a small motor to oscillate a mass. We think this is possible existing controllers can already turn the rumble motors very fast. We will figure out the final space requirements by Thursday, but for now we figure something on the range of 10cm.

The CS students also believe they can extract directional data from the game (bullet hits), so we are hoping to have small rumble motors along each side of the gun which can be activated appropriately.

Gun Look:
We are now actually leaning towards a more gun-like look, definitely not to the point where you'd be mistaking it for a gun, but where you'd look at it and say "oh, that resembles and AK74u" or something else. We've found that a huge proportion of our users enjoyed the realistic look of our darkhorse gun, and even people we have not tested have commented about how one drawback of all existing gun controllers is that they have a distinctive "toy" look. Also, consider that one of the defining features of Call of Duty over other FPS games is that they use all authentic, real gun. Having our controller look like a clearly fictitious gun is very inconsistent with the game.

We know you've had users express concern about it looking too gun-like. For example, the user who didn't want it to look gun-like because his girlfriend wouldn't allow it. We shared this example with out teaching team, and their impression was that it seemed like the user wanted a gun-like controller, but his girlfriend didn't. Also, how common of a worry is this with users if they are already playing an extremely graphic and realistic game as Call of Duty?

If you're worried about laws regarding the realness of gun-controllers, we think we should let Activision worry about that if they decide to push our product to market. For purposes of our EXPE demo, such laws are irrelevant.

Questions/Comments:
1) What is your goal with the airmouse/touchpad aiming? Are you trying to outperform a mouse? Is the airmouse/touchpad noticeably superior to a Wii or Move?

2) Can you clearly explain what the advantages are of a touchpad over other technologies? For example, it seems like a thumbstick would have the same functionality; why is the touchpad better?

3) We don't see the value of creating a proof of concept aiming through film. If we cannot demo something in EXPE, there's no point in making a video of it because it's not a product.

4) How are you guys intending to make the controller buttons functional? We have achieved functional button mapping pretty easily by soldering onto the circuit boards of Xbox and Wii controllers and extending wires to the new button location.

5) We don't see it as a huge priority to make the controller 100% wireless for EXPE; we saw this was a fairly early milestone on your calendar. This is a whole new technology issue and will not add much value to the EXPE demo experience. If Activision pursues this further, surely they can turn a wired device wireless.