I was at my friends house the other day and his dad happened to be at home. His dad makes sensors and one of his sensors has a compass, yaw, roll, pitch, velocity sensor. It is all the size of a double a battery. http://www.clymer.cc/catalog/index.php#terrella He demonstrated it using a program where it control the orientation of a 3d tea pot. It also had a velocity and compass reading gauge. When i saw this the possibilities for this seemed unlimited. One of these sensors goes for 1200 but it seemed like the integration of these into computer games was endless. So me and my friend decided that 3d pong over the internet was the best application of this. A sensore is placed on your hand. You stand infront of a computer screen and you see a ping pong ball coming toward you. THe outline of a paddle is displayed on the screen and the velocity sensor measures how hard you hit it. The linear velocity sensors can tell where the paddle is and the yaw, roll, pitch sensors can tell if you hit the ball at an angle. Somone across the world has the same setup and you play pong. Im bored and thought this was a good idea so i decided to post. Anyone who has 1200 bucks can get one and it comes with the software needed (plug and play). THe other idea i had was a control for counter strike where it sensed movement and adjusted your crosshair. I know this will work cause i asked him and he designed it and said that the pong idea will work. He told me that it would be awesome if this could work for a convention that he goes too.

wow deffinetly endless possibilites there......

I would try it but i dont exactly have 1200 bucks hanging around.

nifty but it costs too much.

I saw a ping pong game like that being demoed that last time I was at the mall. Was on a TV, split-screen for the 2 players. The people held what appeared to be ordinary paddles (obviously with some sensor inside) and swung at the ball as it came towards them on the TV.

I know the cost is sticker shock. If it wasnt i woulda bought one to try to do my pong idea.

I'm sure there are cheaper sensors which can work the same way. I've seen several arcade games which have physical guns that you can move around to shoot things, for example.

Those arcade machines cost in the range of $2000 to $4000 though. =) Usually they're rented.

Not that I know how they work, but they've developed similar things for those silly video golf and baseball games. For maybe $40 you can buy a bat or golf club that you plug into you TV and it contains the game software for a game and to play you have to swing the bat/club. I'm not sure at all about how they work, but if they're any good at all, they must incorporate at least some of what you mentioned.

Those arcade machine guns on the other hand are quite different. Old ones worked by having a sensor watch for a flash from the screen (like how in the old Duck Hunt game, the ducks would flash every time you fired the gun). Newer ones in arcade machines are way more sophisticated but might work on a similar mechanism.

There's also the possibility of doing it kind of like the EyeToy, which uses a webcam and some image processing software to track your movements. The EyeToy is a consumer level product price-wise, though I don't think it's become all that popular...

-Auron

..Or, you could just buy a p5 glove for around 100 bucks.

6DOF, bend sensors for each finger, 1 degree yaw/pitch/roll resolution/accuracy, 0.125" x/y/z resolution at 3 feet from receptor. And I think it's wireless.

It has an optical tracking system though, so you can't swing all around. Velocity has to be calculated from delta-position, but should be easy enough.

It's made by Essential Reality, but their site seems to be down.

link