After three days of GDC Europe in Cologne I just wanted to wrap-up some of my impressions. One of the most interesting talks and presentations for me was about “New Human-Machine Interfaces” and organized by Malte Behrmann (general secretary of the European Game Developer Federation, EGDF).
His guests presented different new game interface technologies and the most striking one for me was a small ball from the finnish company Ball-IT presented by Pasi Pirttiaho. The ball tracks rotation, velocity and – even more interesting – the degree of pressure you put on it. It connects to PCs and consoles via Bluetooth and will be available in September.
Ulrich von Zadow from Archimedes Solutions showed several game interfaces and media art installations like a multi-touch table which is able to track hand movement before it touches the surface of the table, an idea for a pong game in combination with a traffic light (see video above) and a mixed reality RC-cart game which can be controlled via game pads and the cars react to the digital images projections.
Mike Song from Digiwinner (Hongkong) presented a motion tracking system for games which looked similiar to Microsoft`s upcoming Project Natal but can not only track people and their motions but also objects like tennis racks which have to carry a special ball-shaped sensor. More than 10 people can be tracked by the system simultaneously and several objects with sensors can be used.
Other talks I found most interesting were given by Kellee Santiago from thatgamecompany about Flower`s Postmortem and by Matias Myllyrinne from Remedy about their upcoming game Alan Wake.