Forget the newfangled Nintendo Wii controller. That’s old hat. Forget the Sony EyeToy. It doesn’t go far enough.
One of the most interesting new ways to play video games will be to play without any controller at all. You wave your hands and make something happen on the screen. The controls of this Zcam 3D PC camera from 3DV Systems are responsive and the system captures the entire movement of your body. With this camera, you can insert a perfect image of yourself into a video game and play as one of the characters. You can control the character just by moving your body. You can also take out the background behind you and insert a faux background, splicing yourself into the scene the same way that a weather forecaster is spliced into the weather map on TV, only with better quality.
The implications for video games are obvious, and, if the technology pans out, it’s clear that the user-input system of video games is about to move gaming forward the same way that graphics has driven the industry forward for the past few decades.
“We believe this is the next big thing in video games,” Klier said. “We can really put you in the game. The interface devices are changing, starting with Dance Dance Revolution, the EyeToy, the Wii and now us.”
I saw a demo of this technology, working with a real game, from Yokne’am, Israel-based 3DV Systems, a start-up that has been working on the technology for a decade. Zvika Klier, CEO of 3DV, says his company has created a patented video camera that can capture the position of a body in three dimensions. He says it’s possible to ship the camera and a game that works with it for less than $100 in the second half of 2008.
It works. Using a prototype camera with a laptop, Klier showed me how he could fly an airplane using hand gestures. He pretended to move his hands back on an imaginary joystick and the plane on the screen pulled up. He pushed his hands down and the plane dove. He turned his hands and the plane began to bank. He lifted his thumb and pressed down and the plane began shooting its machine guns at an enemy plane. I took over and did the same. I also tried a boxing game that was similar to Wii Boxing and started slugging it out with a buxom female boxer. (Hey, he picked the opponent).
I punched tentatively at first but realized that wasn’t doing the job. I could move my head and the boxing avatar on the screen bobbed and weaved with my movements. Occasionally, it completely missed capturing my blow but it was a prototype that wasn’t tuned with precision. I started delivering body blows and I finally took the other boxer down.
The technology that brings this to you is really high-end, but it’s not as expensive as you might think, Klier said. The company has received eight patents and filed for 12 more. The camera looks like a normal one, but it measures the distance of each pixel in the frame from the camera. It doesn’t calculate it. That’s important, because that really sucks up a lot of processor power. If you approached the problem by calculating, your solution will be expensive, he said.
Rather, the system measures the distance of the object from the “active illumination” camera on a real-time basis. The camera sends out infrared pulses that bounce of the objects and are reflected back to the camera, where sensors indirectly pick up on the time it takes for the bounce backs. The light is captured with a faste and accurate shutter that uses proprietary electro-optical technology developed by 3DV and implemented in a three-piece semiconductor chip set.
An image sensor picks up the light and measures the distance. The brighter the light, the closer the object. The darker it is, the further away. The system corrects for other IR sources in the room. You get a black and white representation of everything within the camera’s field of view. It measures three dimensional space, while the Wii captures two points in space.
The method itself isn’t new; it just hasn’t been successfully done at the right cost to reach consumers, Klier said. It’s called “time of flight” technology and the challenge is being able to truncate the light accurately with split-second timing. Once the company builds a good working camera, which it has, everything else is simple. It plugs into a USB port and it works fine at 60 frames per second in terms of its ability to control actions on a screen. That’s the speed of a first-person shooter game.
Klier said the company wants to create a peripheral that works with both computers and consoles. Game developers can create games around those peripherals the same way that Activision packages a hardware device, a guitar, with its Guitar Hero games.
Beyond games, the system has a lot of other uses. Those include auto safety, such as air bags that shoot out with exact knowledge of where a person’s head is in the car. It could be used as a virtual remote control for a variety of gadgets. It could be used in video conferencing, mobile products, and robot vision.
The founders of the company came from Israel’s largest defense contractor. They were experts in optics and built a $200,000 camera six years ago that was used by broadcasters as a green-screen system where they could slip in a fake background behind a newscaster. But the focus of the company, which has 45 employees, has been to create a mass market product. It raised money a year ago from lead investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
The system uses a gallium arsenide shutter chip, an illumination chip, and a custom chip that coordinates the two other chips. There are competitors out there, including Israel’s PrimeSense, but they are not using the same technology, Klier said. For more images, check out this link.
“We have built the world’s first 3-D camera based on the time of flight know-how that is in the public domain,” Klier said.
Source: The Mercury News