Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service along with corsair Memory and western digital hey guys we're here the Narada booth was something that I almost walked right past this is mad genius and they're amazing amazing controller so what can you tell me about it what we have is a motion controller acceptance based on absolute positioning where most controllers are based on acceleration and what this does is it lets us know where the player is in the room with an accuracy of a hundredth of an inch and we can break the controller in half so we can track each of their hands independently so we can track things like if a player shoots a bow or does other things we can track each side of it separately and we can track that with accuracy of one hundreds of an inch which allows the player to aim with absolute precision and no sensor drift we can get that last little bit when they zoom in on the target we can see that motion and the tracking is enough that we can tell the difference between if the player is breathing or if they're not for some really tight shots it's better to hold your breath just like it is with an actual bow or an actual gun it adds a different feel to the game because it it becomes about how well can you aim how well can you move it's not just putting the crosshairs on something and pushing a button the tracking is also optimized for an area about 8 feet wide about 12 feet deep now so the player can move anywhere in that area in front of the TV and what we do is we link that to the character movement of the game so as the player moves around the character moves with them so they can duck behind an object literally step to the side to step out shoot somebody and then step back and hide again while they reload and it adds a completely different field of the game if they need to move further all of the six and buttons are still active so we haven't removed any controls that they're used to we just add the motion if they want it and if they don't want the motion they put the two halves back together and they have a standard controller like they always have the two house putting about together and taking apart those are really easy to do because it's based on magnets and something you told me earlier actually was because of how absolute the positioning is actually too you can tell because while you're holding it there's a little bit of drift because your body is naturally moving in tiny amounts and it's accurate that if some type of you if you put it down and pointing at the screen it will be exact which is pretty interesting now another thing we talked about when you brought up if you pulled it apart and went like this you could be shooting a bow you can make custom controls for this so how would you go about doing that we have a motion editor and you can pull that up and you can edit the motion design that we've done or you can create your own and that's how the motions for the controller can be customized to the game and this is done without any hardware modification of the console and without any additional software in the console so it can go back on any console and play existing games it's backwards compatible with the games they're already out there because you don't need an additional software solution make the game work so we've gone as far back as ps1 games I've done Gran Turismo and a ps1 and it works just fine with that we've actually gone as far back as the original Castle Wolfenstein and which looks kind of clunky blocky now but you can link into anything and you know with a lot of the new motion controllers that are coming out they have an API that the game developer needs to write to for it to work and I wanted this to work right out of the box so you can pull it out of the box play the games already have and you know in the future would be creative game developers would write for it but if not you still have your entire library that can play differently I think that's really cool because there's a lot of technologies coming out lately like Toby eye-tracking that we've seen in oculus and all these other things that while they're awesome they require a lot of development on the game makers side and with all these technologies coming out it's going to be hard for people to properly develop for everything that's available to them so when a device like this comes out and the hackers in the community can just come out and make their own profiles upload them to the cloud and allow you to download them yourselves it's a lot easier for game makers because while if they want to they can pre packaged it or they can add it later really easily or if they have someone really enthusiastic in their community that they're nowhere is already going to make a really good profile they can just rely on that which is really cool what's your favorite part about this device or what is anything you feel like we've left out so far um there's one thing that it's difficult to get through when you're watching it but it's something that really happens when you play is when you have that level of control something as simple as shifting your weight left to right and the character moves with you there's a connection that makes with your brain and everyone who does it the first time there's a slouch with it because you're like oh I'm connected into it and it's little things like that that changed the gaming experience and so this isn't necessarily about counting milliseconds or a competitive advantage it's about feeling a little more connected with the game as controllers awesome there's a billion different things you can do with it I'm really excited for how easily and seamlessly it integrates with games they're going to be having a Kickstarter in a while I think she said somewhere around a pole or februari but don't quote me on that go to their website look up mad genius you'll find it and there's an input field for your email if you put your email in there they will email you in their Kickstarter is live this is definitely something I'm going to be getting behind as I love different ways of interacting with computers or consoles or whatever if you can interact with it differently I'm all over it I was all over Austin xenia solver oculus all this kind of stuff so I'm super excited for this device thank you for watching this video if you want to see all of our CES 2014 content be sure to subscribe to Linus tech tips and as always thank you to our sponsors ncx WD and course there