Gadgetory

by you in the games i won when it comes to this idea of revolutionize and control the usual driving forces to make something that's more comfortable more ergonomic something that's very intuitive and a very classic concept for this with a very infamous example is the power glove a controller that you can wield single-handedly and control a whole game with gestures alone now the power glove is a very popular example of this but it wasn't the last controller to do it in fact we actually found a very weird option that came out later the reality quest controller this PlayStation controller is one of two models I was able to find that uses the reality quest name the other one being an n64 designed and what's interesting about how it differentiates self-empowered glove is that it's not so much a glove really as it's more of a brace a cast or even just kind of a grip the very basic concept of it is actually really interesting because it's not quite as ambitious and it's a design but it's kind of smart at the same time so you've got buttons here that your fingers able to rest on for the main-floor front-facing ones also buttons for the front shoulder buttons on a Playstation controller on the side here you're able to access again the l1 and r1 as well as l2 and r2 now this is meant to emulate an original playstation controller so it's not worrying about dual analog sticks it's only worried about the d-pad and the way it stimulates that is this little swivel hinge right here so based on how you actually move your hand while you're wearing the grip that's doing the deep now I wasn't actually able to find too much information on these the only thing I could find for the PlayStation version is a single archived article written back when this was first shown off at e3 what year I'm not quite sure and the information there is somewhat helpful but still leaves a few gray areas in its design for instance this button right here is actually designed to access some configuration options like being able to invert the d-pad for certain games like if you want down to be up and up to be down usually useful things like flight simulators as well as sensitivity options for the swivel that's all the article says it doesn't actually say how it works or what buttons used in conjunction with it so not really sure how to wield it specifically but that is what that buttons for now on the underside of the grip is a little switch with three little letters and what that stands for is digital or simulated analog and what that means it is changing the way that the movement on the wrist right here how it's read by the system whether it's being read as a digital control which is the standard on PlayStation controllers or being read as an analog input for more precise control as for what this controller was actually designed for well that's not quite as clear and the one single article I was able to find there was some talking with the reps behind it discussing what kind of games it would necessarily be better for and a lot of the lines up with the kind of logic we've used before with other weird controllers for instance raising games are pretty easy because you only have to worry about hitting one of two buttons accelerate or break and you can turn by just moving controller left and right that's all I got to worry about on the other hand something that's more advanced or crazy like an action game or a sports title this is gonna be a bit more of a nightmare one of the interesting things to me that stood out though was the argument that this would work well for fighting games which I'm not really sold on just imagining having to do things like DoubleTap the d-pad sounds like a nightmare because you're just very quickly doing this and that just seems more annoying than useful and not to mention keeping track of where your fingers are on which buttons and they're trying to input combos so it's not really clear this was meant to give you any kind of advantage in a particular game my best guess is that the lead benefit of this is for situations where you only really have great use of your right hand it's something that would be very useful for any one kind of handicap issue where you're only worrying about using one hand because you control it if you need to use your left hand not so much but if you have a good right hand this would give you a way to control with only one hand in a way that's a little more feasible than past one hand to controller options we've looked at I think it's also worth noting that something the article didn't talk about is that it would be a really good fit for an RPG something like an old-school fun a fancy game because in that case you're not really worried about complex inputs at all you're just wearing the glove and doing movements you need to select different menu options giving you a free hand to I don't know play a cell phone game at the same time or something it's it's a bizarre cell after getting the reality question missing rows a little bit we realized it's kind of important to have a power glove to talk about the history of this entire design style I loved power glove it's pressing Lee enough we actually haven't picked up a power glove yet so in fact today we actually went out and hunted one down my local games try they normally go to didn't have any in stock since it was so short notice but he actually recommended me another guy in the area the store called what up games were able to find one complete in the box to check out and we actually have it right here which is in awesome condition so the power glove compared to the reality quest is really interesting because in a lot of ways it was much more ambitious in terms of how it worked now of course you do have just the regular controls up top of the controller here kind of like the reality quest has with where your fingers go you have access to a d-pad a and B start slices so on so on but where it gets weirder is the programming buttons up top right here so with these you could do things like a just having a turbo function or changing out things are red but you also do actual full programmable macros which was weird for its time what's really intensive but the power glove though is how it handed a little motion controls number two ways it did this the first is by having fiber-optic wires running through four of the five fingers it didn't have one of the pinky because a lot of people it's really hard to move that independently without also moving the ring finger it just relied on these four instead and it ran fiber-optic cables in each of them where based on how much you were closing your fists with that finger different light would travel through it that would make it read one of four positions either being completely open being closed all the way or to mid points the other way would work is with these pair of sound emitters right here at the top of the glove so these would actually send out an ultra high-frequency sound that people kid hear and do it as beeps that would then respond to three microphones that you would place around your TV now the way this worked is the microphones would pick up the sounds and it would figure out based on the time traveling distance between them it could figure out the relative location of the globe so we're gonna set up the power glove and we realized that since all of its sensors and such are based on its own attachments and it's not relying on something like using a CRT like the light gun would we could just use it on a modern system so we actually brought out the analog to hook up to a modern TV and play with power glove it's something look a lot of stuff going in this glove was pretty expensive for its time and so in order to save money and cut down on costs to make it more cheaply available to consumers they cut around a lot of corners and as a result it didn't really work as well as it was meant to the tech was there for things like the motion controls and moving the fingers but none of it was exact enough to really give you a real sense of good control it also doesn't help that while they cut costs it was still pretty expensive this was a hundred bucks for its time and to top it off it was just for this by itself none of the games that were specifically designed for the power glove which there are only two by the way were included with this so if you wanted to actually have a game that made use of it in an interesting way well you had to buy that separately it's really interesting to think about the fact that this even was able to hit the market with the problems it had when at the time Nintendo was very controlling about the concept of Quality Assurance with any kind of product connected to their system now to be clear this was not made by Nintendo Nintendo's name is attached was actually developed and produced by Mattel in the US and that's part of why it was rushed so quickly because they wanted to get it to market as quickly as possible the results of this rush production made the power glove something that well very cool and concept was just considered a terrible controller and it didn't do very well after the initial response however it doesn't change the fact that it ended up having a pretty important part in pop culture I mean again just the concept of a controller you could wear your hand was really cool and doesn't hurt that at the time was being pushed as many different ways as possible including having a featured part in the movie the wizard what is that powerglove it's no surprise than that a control that had such an ambitious idea of how to do virtual reality controls back in that day didn't really continue on in the future and why in the case of the reality quest while it's still approaching this concept of controls of your hands it's a much simpler mechanism on that note let's actually get back to the reality quest and try it on some games so we have the reality quest all hooked up and while we could just play it on a regular PlayStation to try it out the way it was meant to be we decided to make a little weirder and broke out the same adapter we used on another weird controller so we can play this on our ps4 whether or not it's going to work great I have no idea I've made sure that at least reads that I'm hitting buttons and stuff and I haven't tried playing any games yet so to start we're gonna go with what was recommended back in little Oracle by playing a racing game so thing is pretty simple where we just have to worry about going forward and turning so moving the glove around left to right is working for selecting stuff on the menu I do have it on simulated analogue right now let's go ahead and just do a single offline race and see what happens I can already tell there's already a little bit of drift with us though because the menu is freaking out if I was just like a little bit too much this way it's pretty sensitive that might be adjustments I can make with this button right here like I read earlier but I don't actually know what the inputs are to make those adjustments so okay so when you change it to the other settings it looks like it actually changes what everything else gets read as as well I mean you go to full analog this now acts as a d-pad at least that's what it seems like it's embrace let's try this again with remap controls so something about the way this is programmed is that when you go into the other modes for the way the stick is read or the d-pad in this case it also changes the configuration all the other buttons I don't know if that's who had this glove prior was the upper program goes a certain way which I don't know how because the instructions are lost to time so what I'm doing instead is I'm changing the in-game controls to make us the d-pad is used for steering and X is used for acceleration because it when I'm in regular d-pad mode every button seems to work as intended so they will do that okay so one more time I've had to redo this a couple times because when I'm changing modes it seems to also mess with the button configurations of what button acts as what and I never seem to be able to have both the option to steer and accelerate at the same time in a given mode the only one that seems to be lining up with what button should be what is the regular digital mode so what I'm gonna do is I've changed the settings in game to treat d-pad for steering which should still be this motion here and then X and circle for accelerating and braking that should fix all of our problems let's see it works yes okay okay this isn't too bad now now that buttons work hasn't ended I certainly can't do any fancier moves right now because I don't remember what any other button is mapped to but for right now I can accelerate and go forward and turn it's a success I gotta say there isn't something vaguely intuitive about this control scheme but at the same time I can already tell that constantly moving my wrist like this is just gonna get painful like there's no this this is already annoying me yeah that's how you get carpal tunnel right there if you want carpal tunnel get this controller so most of my time was spent just trying to figure out how to get the controls map just right to use an old ps1 fish puller on a ps4 game but in the end yes I can play a game with this it's just not a great idea alright so loaded up Soulcalibur and let's see how this goes I can't imagine this being a good idea actually alright this actually this isn't this isn't too bad uh double-tapping is definitely annoying I gotta say I think the biggest problem with this controller is that it's a little more intuitive than you would think I still wouldn't recommend it for anything with complex button inputs but if you can get the right just few buttons down it really isn't that bad the biggest problem is as you keep playing you're just going to hurt your wrist it's unavoidable the entire way this works is by just constantly flexing this around and that's not that's not good like you should not do this like if you play any game for more than 10 15 minutes this is which I'm doing right now it's not a good feeling I already want to stop shooting this and hey guess what it disconnected so there's a sign right there the concept of a gloves controller is still something we think about today a lot of it comes from the idea of eventually when VR is at its most refined while having a full controller that's just having a hand in a virtual realm makes a lot of sense but historically trying to do that before the tech was really here definitely had its problems whether that's the power gloves lack of refined control or the virtual quests very uncomfortable reliance on moving your wrist around like a madman there's a reason stuff like this just didn't work out at the end but they were necessary stepping stones to establish where we're going in the future with more controllers the standard a gamepad is still the main way to play games but as we get further and further in tech we might see something like this be a more direct ancestor