is razer always this bad?

"darren" wrote:
The device itself is bad... It's a technological issue, apparently.

I'm beginning to believe that motion sensing is not quite there yet as a technology.

On my razor hydra, I can get decent tracking within a certain area, just barely doable for games. But it's far from the dreams we have of knowing exactly where a person's hands are. How hard can it be to know where the hands are in relation to the head? Very damn hard apparently.

Yes... I can make a great user experience for certain things, gestures, etc. and you will never know that the razer hydra is a piece of crap... Is the Wii controller crap? What about leap motion?

If the company can get their act together they could build an actually good product. As it is, razer has not relegated responsibility to actual engineering or expert development, but they have apparently mandated things like game config UI's, etc. etc. It would be nice to have just a good product that works.

That's... disappointing. Maybe the scheme I dreamt up a while back isn't so crazy after all...

I figured the most reliable motion tracking mechanism that's easy for a hobbyist to make is a rotary disk encoder. (the thing that used to be used in mice before optical tracking.) - Those are relatively accurate, though they sense rotational movement, not position.

However, that's not a huge problem for what I had in mind, which was a physical rig that you strap to your arms (and/or legs and torso, depending on how detailed you want to be...)

Assuming just an arm rig by itself, which stops at the wrist (so doesn't track hand movements), you would need to track wrist rotation, elbow rotation, and shoulder rotation in at least 2 axes.

But, combined with information on the length of the connecting frame, and a calibration routine to work out the starting and ending positions of the rotary encoders (they only give relative movement after all), I would expect to be able to track the position (and orientation) of the wrists and elbows with a pretty good level of accuracy.

- in terms of hardware for homebrew use, I even considered hacking some mice. (the problem being finding the old-fashioned kind), since they would contain the main required mechanics, and already have PC interfaces and drivers by default.

... Probably should build a device like that really, if only to see what kind of accuracy it can get, and any obvious user issues it might have...