Motion controller
Input device using sensors to detect and measure physical movement.
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A motion controller is an input device that tracks movement using sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, cameras, or other technologies. These controllers are commonly used for gaming, virtual reality, simulations, and as pointing devices for smart TVs and PCs. Many of the same sensor technologies also appear in smartphones, enabling mobile apps to function as motion controllers.
Cameras
To detect and measure motion, controllers often combine different sensors. Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) use gyroscopes to track rotational changes and accelerometers to track changes in speed, together providing six degrees of freedom (6DOF) tracking. Cameras, paired with computer vision, can be placed on handheld or worn devices or in the environment to track the relative positions of devices, the user's body, or light emitters (either directly or via infrared reflections). Magnetometers detect the Earth's magnetic field or the direction to a nearby base station.
Mechanical
Older mechanical methods—such as potentiometers, Hall effect sensors, and incremental encoders—were once common but have largely been replaced by MEMS and other integrated circuits. These mechanical sensors now appear mainly in joysticks and other controls on motion controllers, though load cells in weighing scales are still used to detect balance and body movements through weight distribution changes. Ultrasonic triangulation and mercury switches appeared in optional peripherals for home consoles in the 1980s.
History
The history of motion controllers includes early arcade games like Sega's Hang-On, which used a motorcycle-shaped cabinet moved by the player's body, sparking the "Taikan" trend of hydraulic cabinets in the late 1980s. The unreleased Sega VR headset (announced in 1991) had built-in motion tracking for head and body movement. Microsoft's Sidewinder Freestyle Pro (1998) was the first PC controller with tilt detection, mapping tilts to analog axes.
The 2000 arcade game Police 911 used motion tracking to mirror the player's movements in-game. The Atari Mindlink, an early proposed controller for the Atari 2600, tracked eyebrow movements via a headband. The Sega Activator (1993) for the Mega Drive used full-body motion tracking but failed commercially due to inaccuracy and awkwardness.
Motion controllers became widespread during the seventh console generation.
Quick Facts
- First arcade motion controller
- Sega AM2 arcade game Hang-On
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
Early uses of motion controllers included the Sega AM2 arcade game Hang-On, which was controlled using a video game arcade cabinet resembling a motorbike that the player moved with their body. This began the 'Taikan' trend of motion-controlled hydraulic arcade cabinets in many arcade games of the late 1980s. The Sega VR headset was an early unreleased VR device with built-in motion tracking, first announced in 1991. Microsoft's first controller with tilt detection was the Sidewinder Freestyle Pro for PC, released in 1998, which could map the tilting of the controller to two analog axes.
Another early example is the 2000 light gun shooter arcade game Police 911, which used motion tracking technology to detect the player's movements. The Atari Mindlink was an early proposed motion controller for the Atari 2600, which measured the movement of the user's eyebrows with a fitted headband. The Sega Activator, based on the Light Harp invented by Assaf Gurner, was released as an optional accessory for the Mega Drive (Genesis) in 1993 and could read the player's physical movements using full-body motion tracking; it was a commercial failure due to its unwieldiness and inaccuracy.
Reader's Guide
Motion controllers became more widely distributed with the seventh generation of video game consoles. The Nintendo Wii console's Wii Remote controller used an image sensor as a pointing device along with an accelerometer to track straight-line motions and the direction of gravity. A later line of accessories and refreshed controllers labeled with the Motion Plus feature added gyroscopic sensors to track all three axes of rotation independent of line of sight to the sensor bar. The PlayStation 3 launched with the Sixaxis controller, which featured three-axis accelerometer motion tracking and a one axis gyroscope.
Several wand-based devices with accelerometer and gyroscopic sensors followed, including the ASUS Eee Stick, Sony PlayStation Move (adding computer vision via the PlayStation Eye), and HP Swing. Other systems used different mechanisms, such as Microsoft's Kinect combining infrared structured light and computer vision, and the Razer Hydra using a magnetometer. Nintendo and Sony adopted motion tracking using gyroscopes and accelerometers as a standard hardware feature in successive generations starting with their handheld consoles the 3DS and the PS Vita.
In the eighth generation, Nintendo and Sony included those sensors as a standard feature of their two-handed game controllers, the Wii U GamePad and the DualShock 4. A wave of virtual reality headsets released in the 2010s adopted forms of 6DOF motion controllers, such as the HTC Vive and Oculus Touch. The Nintendo Switch and its Joy-Con controllers feature 6DOF sensors in each controller and in the main console body. By the mid-2020s, computer-vision pose estimation toolkits such as Google's MediaPipe enabled full-body motion tracking through an ordinary webcam, removing the need for dedicated sensors.
More in Game Controllers and Accessories
Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Motion controller (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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