Razer Sixense Motion Sensing Controller Sick

The magnetic motion sensing technology used by Razer computes exactly where the controller is located and how it's oriented at all times, down to the a millimeter in position and a degree in orientation. It then reports these values with no shadowing and no drift. In gaming that's the difference between guiding a character and actually being that character.



The Left 4 Dead 2 demo shown at CES (see video) is the tip of the iceberg for the hardware's potential in gaming. In an FPS players will be able to throw grenades in any direction, effortlessly lobbing them onto rooftops and through windows. The controllers will be used in racing games as highly responsive steering wheels; in track editors, reaching directly into the game environment to snap track pieces together; or in flight simulators with one controller serving as a flight stick and the other as a throttle. Players will experience fluid 1-to-1 interaction in RTS games; zooming, rotating, giving unit commands, and generally monitoring the state of the field of play effortlessly and intuitively.





Razer's motion sensing system links up to four controllers to a compact base station that generates a magnetic field that’s weaker than the one generated by a hair dryer. The controllers sense changes in this field and compute position and orientation relative to the base station.



Sixense - Gaming Grade Motion Sensing | Razer | For Gamers. By Gamers™.

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There is only one problem: most of us are gaming on 15-16" laptops and are already pretty space constrained. I don't want to sound haughty but this as already been made by Nintendo and Sony. PC gaming isn't really compatible with that kind of motion control

 

if you read the article you would see it uses a different technology then the wii or the sony its way more accurate full 360 degrees low latency. wii has to be pointed to the screen this doesnt. you cant turn the wii remote sensor facing away from the tv or it wont work this works all 360 degrees. it has pinpoint accuracy within 1mm anywhere the remote is in space and its orientation as well. I dunno about most people but I game on my 27" widescreen lcd monitor at home most of the time on a nice large corner desk. I dont usually game when im at school with my laptop, i sometimes may game at a friends house if i bring my laptop but 95% of my gaming is on a 27" lcd screen at home with plenty of room. If enough games support it I would definately get it.

 

My problem with this is developer support. Take the Novint Falcon for instance...the best peripheral ever, I love mine...but it is easily one of the most revolutionary gaming devices ever made but the problem lies with the support it can get. When playing games with the Falcon (or Razers Sixense) they can be 10x more involving and deep than with a controller or mouse/keyboard but the problem is that games have to support it.

Do you think that game developers want to take time to implement technology that will be used by probably less than half of 1% of PC gamers? No...they dont, and they wont. So unless Razer has its own development team working on the support for games and arent just relying on the game devs to build support on their own, this will NEVER take off...

People that make the Novint Falcon have actively been working on F-Gen...a software suite that actually allows you to use the Falcon for ANY game...basically replacing the mouse with it...and they can build support for games using F-Gen...if Razer has something like this it can work...if the customer support and advertising to push the product are there...if relying solely on game developers it will go the way of vaporware.

 

They should just make an off-brand controller for Wii, PS3 Move, or a sensor bar for Kinect. This will not be successful on the PC platform; and honestly I think Kinect and PS3 Move will fail as well.

 

i like this magnetic field stuff they are doing tho. its way better then the ir bar for the wii. If they could adapt the magnetic field thing for the wii that would be cool and if only the wii was hd such a shame it isnt.