@Kappische

The watch as a gamepad?

(“brain” dump, eg me trying to anticipate the future haha)

If you are following me on twitter you probably saw that I got my kickstarted pebble smart watch recently. What a pebble can do is receive and send data to your phone. Currently, my pebble shows SMS and phone calls I get, and I can adjust what songs are playing. But on android you can do a lot more.

Anyhow. This got me thinking. Since there are a lot of rumors surrounding the next wave of gadgets among the big mobile companies (Google, Apple, Samsung) that they are going to do smart watches. There were also rumors during GDC that Apple showed of a gamepad to developers. I doubt that Apple will do a gamepad since they have put in so much effort on touch screens and a gamepad won’t revolutionize anything we do today. And gampads as they are today are clunky and you don’t really want to run around with one in your pocket.

So this got me thinking. Since gaming is probably the number one activity on smart devices, can we do it better? (Or maybe we dont need to since it is number one…). A smart watch has buttons, we wear it everyday, it is not clunky and can do more things than just show the time, so why not use it as a gamepad? The number one reason why I really don’t play as much as I should on my phone is because of buttons. I may be very traditional in that sense, but my gaming experience is way better with buttons. I enjoy games on xbox/ps3 more than on my phone.

So how would a smart watch look like to behave as a game pad? My only “design” right now is that you have to remove the watch from your wrist to use it. That is not so efficient, but doable. I really don’t know what a smart watch gamepad would look like since I havent tried to concept it on paper (lulz, me painting). We just need to figure out how to design it in a proper way! Post your drawing in the comments =D

Or I am totally wrong and everyone will start using this tech instead - touch screens that can create “bubbles” that behave as button! Now that is a next gen touch device!

posted 2 weeks ago

The future of the Playstation X? Tomorrow we will know!

Playstation X will be announced tomorrow! Or ..something :D I hope they will start talking about why they bought gaikai last year. My guess is that they will bring backwards compatibility for ps1 and ps2 games that way. I don’t see how they would be able to stream ps3 games today.

Above is one of the leaked pictures of the new Playstation gamepad. Do you think it is legit? It sure looks ugly but maybe the features are all there :)

The rumors says that it got a trackpad area. It also got an audio output in between the analog sticks and it also seems to have a speaker? Or is it a mic (maybe both?). It also seems to have some kind of lamp on the top similar to the move gamepads.

Other than that it looks like the regular ps3 gamepad. The rumors also says that the trigger buttons are better. The d-pad seems to have been adjusted. I hope it is better :)

I’m looking forward to see what the Sony guys will show off tomorrow!

posted 3 months ago

Next gen gamepad. What is that?

So, I have been thinking again. Im not even sure my solutions are solving any real issues, but it would sure make stuff a bit easier =D

What would you expect from a next gen game pad?

What do you think will make it so much better?

The Valve people have been talking about latency and how to optimize input, but I have never really felt that the latency has been an issue. It maybe is a big issue in MP games, don’t have a clue to be honest, but the less latency in the hardware the better.

Well, I dont know what Valve are cooking but let’s try to figure out what we dont like doing with game pads.

Here is my unfinished list:

One thing is onscreen keyboards. They are always horrible to write on with a gamepad. Valve (hmm I wonder if I didnt see something similar on the hacked xbox that I used to have, the big ol chunky one) have tried doing a flower keyboard which looks nice. I havent used it much myself but it somewhat reminds me of good ol T9. I think the Wii and PS3 got T9? :D

One other thing that is annoying on consoles are typing in passwords or emails or similar where you need to confirm info. Maybe you could have a finger print reader on the gamepads to solve this? It would also speed up the process for when you going to a friend to play some games with them on your profile. You probably wont be doing this a lot but you could have it on every time you want to log in, or every time you are going to make a purchase. It sure sounds crazy with sending over a print of your finger but you can probably hash and salt it (yeah, I don’t know what I’m talking about right now, but probably people who understand encryption can solve it =D)

Pairing the game pads

for some reason I almost fail paring several game pads at once at least two times.´on my xbox. Maybe NFC would help here? Just touch the game pad on the console and it is paired.

Moving around in menus

The xbox got voice commands, but it is sure silly to shout at your tv all the time (and it doesn’t support all languages). I like the idea with a trackpad on the gamepad similar to the OUYA one. But maybe it would be easier to fit it in on the back side of the gamepad, or would that just make it weird? You guys who play a lot on your Vita maybe can tell more about it? Since consoles are becoming more and more multi purpose it would probably help having some kind of a pointer. But if you hook up a PC to your tv this would be great too. Or maybe eye tracking..? :P

Batteries

Why do we still need to charge the game pad? These guys says that their solar tech and special battery can last for how long you may ever need it :)

(it feels like I’m writing about a smaller size of the wii u controller…)

posted 3 months ago

Game Art at Tekniska museet in Stockholm

Blueberry Graden by Erik Svedäng

Bayonetta de-make by Junkboy

Quote from Junkboy where he says that games will rule the world.

Zelda 3 cross stich. Dont remember the creator’s name =/

posted 3 months ago

The OUYA updated gamepad!

Ahoy internauts!

The OUYA team have listend to a lot of feedback and you can read about the gamepad changes here:

http://www.ouya.tv/its-all-about-control/

Sounds neat to me :) I wish them all the best of luck.

What do you think of the new gamepad iteration?

(however I would love to try out the new one and give it a new “review)

This weekend I will be travelling to Skövde (my hometown!), to hang out with my brother and family. So there will probably not be any longer blog post this week. 

(or maybe I could do it on the train…)

posted 3 months ago

Tetris lamp!

I finally found the tetris lamp in a store and ordered it asap! I’m so happy with it since I’m a huge tetris fan :)

Where did I get it?

iwoot.com - I got a UK adapter but Im happy anyway :D 

Swedes can get it now at roligaprylar or coolstuff

posted 4 months ago

The OUYA gamepad - a preview

(sorry for blurry pics)

Recently we got the OUYA game console and I promised a friend on twitter to write something about the gamepads that are inclued in the OUYA.

Please note that the gamepads that I got are from the developer version and doesn’t reflect the final version of the gamepad for the OUYA. It will be interesting to compare the two in the future.

The layout of the gamepad is pretty much as the Xbox one, which I like. The major difference is the center area. So let’s start there!

The first thing you may notice when you look at this gamepad is the green area in the middle of the gamepad. The green area is the touch-area. It is quite clever to have a touch area since the console is based on the Android system. The touch area is basically a trackpad. As soon as you touch around on it the mouse points is shown and moves on the screen. When you stop using the track pad the mouse pointer fades out. The pointer was a bit laggy (remember, dev version) but what was maybe even more annoying was that you didn’t get any tactile feedback when you were on or off the trackpad. I would prefer if the trackpad was made of some other material or if it had edges so you knew when you were close to the edge.

The analog sticks have a good placement and they are clickable. The biggest issue with them are that they are very slippery. I had issues rotating/pushing the sticks and having my thumbs on them because of the slipperiness. This could be a dev-gamepad-issue and hopefully this will be fixed.

The d-pad is crap, just like the xbox one. It is actually even worse than the xbox one. Hopefully this is just a dev gamepad issue.

The face up buttons work fine. They have the same placement as the xbox and even the same colors. They click good too. However the font on the buttons is very thing and it can be hard to see the color. Maybe it would work better if the colors were inverted?

So on to the shoulder buttons/triggers! It feels like the triggers were to high up in comparison to where my index fingers would rest on the back side of the gamepad. I would prefer if they were moved down. Seriously, just copy the gamecube here please, OUYA. The gamecube got the perfect needed pressure to push them down and the click is very satisfying. 

I like that the batteries don’t take up any extra space on the back in comparision to the xbox gamepad. However it was a bit tricky to understand how to open up the sides of the gamepad to put them in. You have to “peel” the sides off from the shoulder buttons. It wasn’t 100% obvious.

Conclusion

The trackpad area is what makes this gamepad special. Other than that, there isn’t much to report at this time. Also, things may change for the final version. Just wanted to let you know again that I got the dev unit from the kickstarter.

If you got questions, just let me know in the comments and I’ll try to answer :)

posted 4 months ago

Games that inspire musicians…

Or the other way around? Here is one example :D

How many can you find? 

posted 4 months ago