On the input side of things...talking about touch, it is so amazingly natural, it is the most natural computer input weve ever had, watching kids interact with this is really remarkable. And to think we had touchscreens, we had light pens and all that for so many years, and it was only until the smartphone, and eventually the tablet that its really made its mark. And its interesting to wonder how many technologies could be like that, where theyre niche things right now, but five years from now theyre going to be ubiquitous and kind of the cornerstone of the way we interact with things.
Mouse and keyboard have, are, the most precise current things to be interacting with. Youve got the direct relative motion of the mouse - its not direct motion because youre moving your hand [down there] and and interacting with something there [on the screen], but its still highly precise.
Game controllers are still, unfortunately, a really bad interface for certain types of things, because theyre not direct interaction. In the old days a game pad for a Super Nintendo, a Nintendo gamepad, was actually not an unoptimal interface because all you did was Mario go right, Mario go left. Its a binary interface, the button was completely reasonable for this. Its only when we started to do turning on game controllers and bringing analog onto it that it became a really really bad thing. I mean, its better than nothing, its better than binary having an analog on it, but its not good. Youre using this coarse, low precision muscle in your thumb and time integrating, and you watch people a lot of times playing games and theyre even pulse modulating with their thumb, theyre trying to get the exact analog position, wait the right amount of time, you know its like snap snap snap [gesturing thumb wag], trying to kind of bump your way into the right position. Its just not good, but its what weve got to live with.
I think some of the controllers where you start to see sparks of betterness - I think the PS Move, its still got a sort of latent, laggy interface to it, but at least youre moving something and youve got buttons. I think the Razr Hydra, with the two tracked things...I think its unfortunate that its got wires and doesnt have any feedback inside it... but I think something like that is where well wind up, where youve got sort of the split thing, two hands, that can be moved and tracked independently while still having all the buttons to do your intentional actions on it. I think things will migrate that way usefully.
And some of the other things, like the PS Move gun controller, where youve got a tracked gun with a Wii Move [?!
] and a thumbstick on the end of it, things like that will be really exciting, will be a good interface for things. If you have that in a virtual reality environment, itll be exactly what you want.
