A new life for physics engines?

You can’t buy any PC these days without some graphics acceleration, and you certainly can’t play games without a decent GPU. Yet add-on physics accelerators have yet to catch on. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Why would a user spend the money on a physics card if games don’t use it? Then again, why would a game company target a physics card if no users have them? The few games that have made use of physics accelerators have just used them for “eye candy” — fancier explosions or slightly more real incidental animation with absolutely no impact on the gameplay at all. After all, if they required a physics card (as they do for specific GPUs), then many fewer people might by the game.

Well, some recent developments might change that. Several recent news stories report that NVIDIA is buying physics-accelerator company Ageia. Hard to say where they’re going from here, but certainly a combo GPU/physics processor might finally break the deadlock and get enough physics accelerators out there to make them viable.

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Dawrin motion-based game controller to challenge Wiimote

Motus Corporation has developed its Darwin game controller and hopes that it can replicate the popularity of the Nintendo’s Wiimote to other consoles and PCs. Darwin is scheduled for release in Fall 2008, and is said to feel more realistic. Darwin uses a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes to track its motion. The New York Times has a good overview of how the Wiimote works. A recent note in Technology review, Moving In on the Wii, has more information.

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Wiimote head tracking

CMU PhD student Johnny Chung Lee has done some amazingly cool things with the Nintendo Wii remote (Wiimote). My favorite is using it for true 3D virtual reality head tracking. Compare that to the thousands you’d spend for a magnetic tracker from Ascension or Polhemus. Admittedly, magnetic trackers don’t have the line of sight constraints of the infrared Wiimote, but for “fish tank VR”, where your computer screen serves as a 3D window into the virtual world, that’s probably just fine. Need convincing? Check the video out the video on his web site.

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How to build your own gaming computer

If you were motivated by Professor Olano’s recent post on games that require high-end machines to, here’s a site for you — Learn How to Build Your Own Gaming Computers. It covers all aspects of assembling a computer optimized for gaming. Building your own box or upgrading your current one can save you money as well as give you hands on experience with current hardware technology.

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