Future of Magical Gaming

[bkdelong]

So on the train platform this morning I was daydreaming about new ways to enhance gaming after being prompted through jducouer's discovery of a Chainsaw Peripheral. Naturally, having been reading the Dresden Files, watching Doctor Who with his Sonic Screwdriver, and always with a bit of Potter on the brain, on my mind was magic.

I was trying to think of how to enhance the actual experience of casting ala Harry Potter. Often when I think of the cross betwen magic and tech, the "TechnoMages" of Babylon 5 fame come to mind.

Duh - what about somatic spells? In Harry Potter, it takes years of practice to get good at non-verbal magic. The Wii does to a little bit with gesture recognition but with eClothing, one could include a function of the woven nanosensors to detect internal movement of the arms and body as well as calculations of external visual movement.

But what about voice recognition? This would be immeasurably more powerful with a subvocal recognition interface but we're still years beyond that. The wand would have to have a powerful conical mic to catch whatever one is saying.

Of course what would stop the user from just shouting into the Wii-Wand? Well, magic has to be the successful combination of gesture AND vocal recognition. In fact, the game would use some of the behavioral recognition to try and determine confidence levels and calculate that into the "Success / Fail roll" so to speak.

Fun, cool stuff.

Comments

[spin1978.livejournal.com]

I have what may or may not be an interesting suggestion, based on one of my other fandom obsessions. I'm not super-familiar with the Wii system, so I might be totally off on an irrelevant tangent.

In the anime/manga series Naruto, the main characters (ninjas) "cast spells" (perform various and sundry ninja techniques) by making a series of gestures (hand seals which are vaguely based on the mudras - symbolic gestures from Hindu/Buddhist traditions) which are intended to collect and mold magical power (chakra) before casting the spell (performing the technique). Going off that idea, something like a wand with five rows of sensors with 3/4 pressure-sensitive buttons per row would allow you to make multiple "seals" on the wand in a particular order, and the wand would read out the relative orientation. So, for example, each row is labeled by a number and the four buttons are A,B, C, and D.

Then again, maybe this wouldn't work. I would make a mock-up prototype right away, but I really should get back to writing my thesis....