Moving Targets Article

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With the Laserscope perched atop your head, an eyepiece showed you where you were aiming. You simply had to look at the target. Unfortunately, what came next immediately placed the Laserscope in the same awkward company as its predecessors. Whenever you wanted to actually shoot what you were looking at, you had to shout "Fire!" into the attached microphone. As with the aiming, it did at least work, but the unavoidable embarrassment attached to the hardware meant that few players were keen on bobbling their heads around like Twiki and bellowing "Fire fire fire fire fire" for hours on end. With only the eminently punchable Johnny Arcade to extol its virtues, the Laserscope joined the Power Glove and U-Force in the rapidly growing pile of useless plastic crap that NES owners had shamefully accumulated.

With early Nintendo fans duly turned off the notion of motion control for another three hardware generations, the next bite at the cherry came from arch-rival SEGA, and it was to be a peripheral which would pretty much kill motion sensing in games for another decade.

The SEGA Activator was arguably the most misguided of all motion accessories, both clumsy in design and appallingly inept in execution. Produced for the Megadrive in 1994, it took the form of a plastic octagonal ring which had to be assembled piece by piece. Infrared beams rose up from each section, and breaking these beams with your extremities sent different control signals to the console. To "press start", for example, you had to stick both arms out behind you.

Right from the start, the project was plagued by obvious problems. The flimsy plastic ring was easily kicked while playing, while the beams struggled to cope with any variation in the ceiling above, whether it be a lampshade or uneven coat of plaster. The ring had to be put together in exactly the same sequence each time, and had to be recalibrated even when changing cartridges. "Feel free to consider yourself a pioneer on the interactive frontier" gushed the 5/10 before sternly detailing the many things that you absolutely must not do in order to keep the temperamental gadget working.

Most damagingly, the Activator was awful for playing games - doubly so, since it was inexplicably marketed as being ideal for fighting games. Players soon found the reality was quite the opposite, since it was virtually impossible to perform any combo moves. The directional controls were mapped to the front, rear and sides of the ring, with the face buttons in between. There was simply no way to go left, up-left, up in one fluid motion. If a limb or trouser leg passed over an intervening beam, the game got horribly confused while players strained uncomfortably to keep their balance. Essentially little more than a crude dance mat made of invisible light, the Activator sank without trace.

It would be nine years before anything resembling motion control would be taken seriously again, but the next attempt would finally prove a roaring success. While it was Nintendo that pioneered motion control, and later made it ubiquitous, it was Sony that first managed to turn it into a commercially and critically successful product.

In the end, cracking the motion control nut required nothing more sophisticated than a USB webcam coupled with simple yet appealing software - not so much a lesson Nintendo took on board, but a reminder that cheap technology could often be creatively repurposed for wild profit. Supported by over thirty games, some would argue that the EyeToy isn't even a motion sensing device in the strictest technical sense, merely a method of gesture recognition, but there's no denying that it allowed players to play games with their whole bodies rather than just fingers and thumbs, and also warmed up the casual market which would make the Wii such a smash.

Of course, that didn't stop some companies from falling back on the old standards of intrusive gadgetry and weak software. The Gametrak system, released for PS2 and Xbox in 2004, tried to sell gamers on one-to-one recreation of arm movements using string.

Supposedly inspired by a retractable hotel room washing line, Gametrak used tension cables on spools for its effect. These cables passed through small analogue joints and clipped onto fingerless gloves worn by the player, so as they moved their arms the device was able to work out the in-game positioning by how much string was spooled out, and in which direction the strings were being tugged. Simple, but surprisingly effective.

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