Last week we attended OCE Discovery in Toronto, Canada, to demonstrate our latest 3D motion camera technology. Photo above from left to right: David McFadden, OCE Chair of the Board; Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple; Hon. John Milloy, Minister of Research and Innovation; Eric, our gaming guru showing off Mgestyk's 3D camera.
Our booth at the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) turned out to be a popular destination. Thanks to everyone who stopped by to try out our touch-free control technology; we met many cool people and made some valuable connections.
Special thanks to the following press folks: Joystiq, com.puter.tv, ESPN, DirecTV, FUJI Television News Network, Spike, The Guardian, break.com, ustream.tv, Yahoo Games Spain, South East Media Network, it.worldwide, cmd agency, E Cinema Networks, invodo, andPOP, bnetTV, Computer Times, G Entertainment Films, livegen.fr, 90.9 FM WCDB, Perspective Media Group, Quango, giiks.com, and any others we may have missed.
The show will be held from Thursday, January 8 through Sunday, January 11, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Las Vegas Convention Center and Sands Expo. We will be located in South Hall 2 of the Convention Center in booth #25622 (Gaming Showcase). Come see Mgestyk in action and try out our latest version!
Thanks to everyone who came out to see us at MIGS 2008! We had a lot of fun organizing the many car races and lightsaber battles that took place. You can find few pics from our booth below (click "Read More" for all).
Tristan Péloquin, a technology writer for the popular Montreal newspaper La Presse, already posted his review: "I tried [it]. It works!".
If you would like to become a Mgestyk distributor, please contact us.
If you've tried games like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and the recent Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Lightsaber Duels on the Wii, you may have been disappointed that the in-game lightsaber does not always match how you are holding the wiimote.
Introducing Fusion from Mgestyk Technologies: Fusion is a patent-pending technology which combines Mgestyk's gesture processing with other sensor data such as from Nintendo's wiimote.
We'll be demoing this at MIGS next week along with some of the games from our first video. What follows is a description of what the new video shows and how Mgestyk Fusion enhances gaming with a wiimote:
If you want to swing the wiimote around like a lightsaber, you will most likely not be pointing the wiimote at the Wii's sensor bar.
On the Wii console, the sensor bar allows the console to determine data for roll, up/down translation, left/right translation, and to a very limited degree, forward/back translation. The wiimote accelerometers also register data in these four degrees of freedom.
Pitch and yaw cannot be accurately obtained via the sensor bar, although pitch does register on the wiimote's accelerometers (yaw does not).
With Mgestyk Fusion, the sensor bar is replaced with a 3d camera, which can still determine translation data (including better forward/back translation than the sensor bar), but also determines yaw through image processing. Pitch and roll data from the wiimote's accelerometers are fused with the 3d data to determine the orientation of the wiimote in 3D space. The wiimote is connected to a PC via bluetooth in our video.
Nintendo's MotionPlus was announced to use the InvenSense IDG600 chip, which will add a dual-axis gyroscope to the wiimote. We look forward to trying MotionPlus since the two gyroscopes will improve yaw and pitch tracking, but three accelerometers and two gyroscopes are still not enough for tracking all six degrees of freedom. This means that you will still need to point the wiimote at the Wii's sensor bar for certain motions required for the full "lightsaber" experience.
Accelerometers only register data when they are accelerating. They do not provide useful data if you are moving the wiimote without making sudden changes in motion. By using a 3D camera, a better measurement of the wiimote's absolute position and speed in 3D space is obtained. In the video, we show how the saber can be moved around the 3D ragdoll with ease. Mgestyk Fusion will enhance the experience of gaming input devices such as MotionPlus.
Finally, Mgestyk allows you to use hand gestures in addition to the wiimote for controlling the environment. We show a simple "force push" in this video, although a large variety of gestures, such as the ones from our first video, are possible.
We're grateful for the tremendous amount of response we've received from all the YouTube viewers and blog readers these past few days.
Based on your comments, lag was the major concern; this is just a matter of optimization and rest assured that we're providing our programmers with all the pizza and beer... err... pop they need to continue improving it.
If you've emailed us and haven't received a reply yet, please know that we will reply to you soon. We are currently working on releasing another video... we think it's even better than the first. :)
Remember Tom Cruise in Minority Report? Remember when he magically moved photos, videos, etc. from one place to another with just a simple flick of his wrist? Well, that power can be yours too. This is not science fiction - this is Mgestyk gesture-based control from Mgestyk Technologies. Check out this video to see some of the cool things you can do with Mgestyk.
