LCD Lightgun

[TheAdMan]

Why don't you look at the trackIR WITH HEADCLIP (tou tube link I posted --BINGO! Either that, or I was attempting to say "before" but it was too many letters to type--) then tell me your thoughts.

[TheAdMan]

I was thinking something like this:

[TheAdMan]

These leds are pretty close together compared to LCD topgun or something similar, I believe this is where their "patented math" comes into play.

[Fozzy The Bear]

Why don't you look at the trackIR WITH HEADCLIP (tou tube link I posted --BINGO! Either that, or I was attempting to say "before" but it was too many letters to type--) then tell me your thoughts.

Thoughts are still the same....  There's a vast diference between providing a rotate left or right instruction and providing an accurate real world gun  in relation to real world physical screen surface position.

And you'd still have to have widely spaced markers or LED's on the gun. Making it impractical.

The only reason it can calculate 3D positional information is because of the spacing and difference in positional data.  That's why we (the majority of people who have two eyes that is) can see in 3D.  Looking at a single point (like a gun) with a single point (like a camera) will not give you positional or depth information.

These leds are pretty close together compared to LCD topgun or something similar, I believe this is where their "patented math" comes into play.

No... this is where the close proximity between the head and the camera comes into play, for the system, this makes them appear to be further spaced out.

That also means that it then won't work for larger screens, or greater distances. They've already made clear to you that their system has a maximum of a five foot working distance, and this is why it does.

Their headset has a total spacing on the LED's of about 5 to 6 inches.  You've still got to provide that spacing on a gun for it to even be close to working and even then with a distance limit of 5 feet, or else you need to increase the camera resolution to cope, at huge cost. Which is something else they made clear to you.


Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[TheAdMan]

I think your just being stubborn.

those led's aren't that far apart, if you can strap them on ur head you can weild them on a gun - just like the laser on the LCD topgun - have u seen lightguns out there lately, most of them are hulking super-soaker looking things anyway.

and the trackIR does a lot more than provide left or right instruction.

[TheAdMan]

I already stated that a 5 foot limit would be perfect as far as I'm concerned I don't want to stand ten feet away from the screen, is that how you play a shooter in the arcade? - no.

[Fozzy The Bear]

I think your just being stubborn.

Oh OK I suppose that Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Honda... etc etc were also being stubborn when they abandoned development of all such systems, because they couldn't make them work in the application you want them to.

and the trackIR does a lot more than provide left or right instruction.

No... you missunderstand....  It's providing positional information. But in the examples shown it's not having to provide it at accurate real world resolution. It's providing scalable left right (plus 5 other axis) movement but it's not providing it related to the real world flat front face of the monitor or in relation to any particularly specific pixel resolution.

Understand that it's just not going to work, no matter how much you want it to.

And all this because you don't want to stick the LED Stands onto your monitor.

I already stated that a 5 foot limit would be perfect as far as I'm concerned I don't want to stand ten feet away from the screen, is that how you play a shooter in the arcade? - no.

Well you clearly have not set up a Topgun correctly then... because mine works perfectly well at less than 5 feet from the screen. And actually if you measure the distance to screen, or even the percieved distance to screen in a real arcade you'll find it's actually more than 5 feet.

As for it being perfect for you, just because it's right for you, doesn't mean it is for everybody else. So in producing these with a ridiculous 5 foot distance limit they'd be killing a large chunk of potential market anyway.  So what you're suggesting is actually that anybody with a large (over 21") screen or projector shouldn't be catered for.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[TheAdMan]

^^^^that's why I'm asking.

You may be right but I'm not trying to argue technology here, I'm asking if it could be done would people buy it that's all. If a developer feels like they can do something, I think they should give it a try.

[Fozzy The Bear]

You may be right but I'm not trying to argue technology here

Well actually you were.... but I'll let that one go.

If a developer feels like they can do something, I think they should give it a try.

Yes, and as I already pointed out to you, Sega, Namco, Nintendo, Sony and Honda already have done and after pouring millions of dollars into trying to get it to work, all decided that it was better to put the widely spaced IR LED's round the monitor and the camera in the gun because by doing that you instantly solve 99% of the problems.

Not to mention the Firehawk, which was cancelled for all of the above reasons. It's simply not possible to achieve the result you want, at the accuracy needed, within a budget that the very small market for these will stand. Sorry to tell you this but their accountants were right. It'd be commercial suicide to try it.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[TheAdMan]

Why are you sorry? It just means you move on to the next idea.

[Fozzy The Bear]

Why are you sorry? It just means you move on to the next idea.

I don't need to.... the LCD Topgun works fine thanks, and is shortly to work even better at even closer range.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[TheAdMan]

really, are they coming out with a new version or something?

It's will be pretty much impossible to get me to mount aything to a brand new HDTV, especially anything that requires adhesive - I can live without a few lightgun games.

[Fozzy The Bear]

really, are they coming out with a new version or something?

Don't know.... but I do know that a third party developer IS coming out with a cheap add on for them that will reduce the required gun to screen distance to below 3 feet.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[TheAdMan]

So will you at least agree with me on the fact that (for most setups) the Topgun requires the player to be a little ( a lot, ehem) too far back from the screen?

Not to mention if I left those LED strip mounted to my TV all the time I might never get laid again:
Hot Chick: "What are those things on your TV"
Me: "Those are for my Lightgun arcade games, neato huh!?"
Hot Chick:"I have to get up early tomorrow."

[Fozzy The Bear]

So will you at least agree with me on the fact that (for most setups) the Topgun requires the player to be a little ( a lot, ehem) too far back from the screen?

I really can't agree with you on that, because most people who own them on here love them and don't consider 5 feet to be too far away. If they're set up correctly you can get it down to less than 5 feet.

Not to mention if I left those LED strip mounted to my TV all the time I might never get laid again

 

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[Organic Jerk]

but I do know that a third party developer IS coming out with a cheap add on for them that will reduce the required gun to screen distance to below 3 feet.

Have I been under a rock?  When did this news surface?

[RandyT]

... but I do know that a third party developer IS coming out with a cheap add on for them that will reduce the required gun to screen distance to below 3 feet.

Julian,

Are you saying that somebody actually got a fish-eye to work with one of those? 

I agree with what you've been stating, BTW.  I was skeptical until I saw the video, but didn't really connect  with the fact that very coarse positional data is fine for head tracking.  That would mean not very precise targeting capabilities in an FPS as well.

But one thing I don't really agree on is the distance required for the top guns to work.  My control test is HOD3, which I played a bit in the arcade, and the XBOX version on a 36" monitor with the Top-Gun.  I needed to be a good 4 to 5 feet further away with the Top-Gun than in the arcade setup.  Accuracy was very good, but smaller targets are harder to hit, so the game dynamic was changed.  A smaller monitor lets you get closer to the screen, but a small screen means smaller targets so everything is relative.

If one could get closer to the screen with the top-gun, there would be no need for a better solution.

RandyT

[RandyT]

Not to mention if I left those LED strip mounted to my TV all the time I might never get laid again:
Hot Chick: "What are those things on your TV"
Me: "Those are for my Lightgun arcade games, neato huh!?"
Hot Chick:"I have to get up early tomorrow."

 

If you have such a delicate balance going on there that she leaves because of some LED bars on your TV set, you are probably kidding yourself thinking she'd come up to your apartment in the first place.

RandyT

[Fozzy The Bear]

Are you saying that somebody actually got a fish-eye to work with one of those?

  I might be.....

But one thing I don't really agree on is the distance required for the top guns to work.  My control test is HOD3, which I played a bit in the arcade, and the XBOX version on a 36" monitor with the Top-Gun.  I needed to be a good 4 to 5 feet further away with the Top-Gun than in the arcade setup.

Noted Randy.... I'm set up at the moment with the LED bars above and below a 21" screen and can get under 5 Feet. So that would make a difference.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[AMDman13]

If someone comes up with a 3-5ft range for a 27" monitor then I would buy one today! I have not yet dabbled in the light gun scene because of this.

I can't wait for this solution.

And I already score a hot chick with a Mame Cabinet in my bedroom. Don't you guys know.... Dorks Rule!!

[patrickl]

Talk about coincidence, just now my girlfriend starts complaining about the ledstrips on the TV in the livingroom 

[TheAdMan]

LOL, I'm tellin' you man those LED strips are hideous - they're chick repelants.

MAME cabinets are chick magnets tho, marlborroman's got the right idea with the cabinet in is bedroom. "If you build it they will come"

I kept that clean.

[AndyWarne]

In terms of positioning technology, the Wiimote renders everything else obsolete. I am assuming the Topgun uses a simple system whereby each LED is lit in turn and the response measured at the gun and the position calculated. This is not going to be all that accurate and requires the hideous LED bars.
This system was used by Sega on some games and was never considered very good although to be fair they might have worked on it and improved the system to an acceptable level of accuracy.
The Wii uses a camera in the front of the remote. This looks at the screen and surrounding area and then the image is real-time processed to pick out the LED bar (which only needs to be small) from the image.
The LED bar is just permanently lit by a voltage source.
The camera chip has the image processing built-in and sends an X-Y position back to the CPU for each LED detected on the bar. Only one LED is really needed for a gun since rotational motion is not required.
Expect to see this kind of chip available sometime. At the moment it is not available as it was a custom chip by Pixart for Nintendo. Once a similar chip becomes available all current designs will be obsolete overnight.
There is always the possibility of buying a load of Wiimotes and removing the image chips and integrating into a design. I have actually thought about this (mainly after a few beers hehe) but the cost would be rather high and not sure about the legal situation.
The standard Wiimote can be used as a gun of course and it is wireless too (bluetooth) and works on a PC. Not very gun-like in appearance though.
Andy

[Fozzy The Bear]

I am assuming the Topgun uses a simple system whereby each LED is lit in turn and the response measured at the gun and the position calculated. This is not going to be all that accurate and requires the hideous LED bars.

Actually Andy no.... I thought that it might work that way before I got sight of one. Sega and Namco developed the system for arcade use. pretty much everyting beyond the first House Of The Dead uses it.  HOTD 1 to 5, Ghost Squad, Time Crisis 2 to 4, etc etc.....

The Sega and Namco arcade systems actualy calculate position from being able to see at least 3 of LED's out of the ten groups at the top and bottom of the screen. They're not pulsed they're on constantly.

The same applies to the LCD Topgun. It's just an IR source. The difference with the Topgun is that it has to be able to see all of the LED's all of the time, to be able to do the calculation, and it also has a poorly chosen lens system on the off the shelf camera module. Which is why it suffers slightly with the distance range compared to the arcade version.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[Lilwolf]

A little late to the discussion... but...

I would only be interested in it if...

1) two player support...  Even if we have to play games with it to get it to work.  But if thye can give a joystick version that would be great for other games... but dual mice would be great.

2) wireless would be GREAT (handle is a great place for some batteries).

3) Camera is small... or can be taken out of the case and still work to fit behind a marquee or something.

4) works well with a slanted monitor.  Many monitors are on an angle (gauntlet cab) but the marquee is vertical (where the camera would probably have to go.   BTW, I don't care if this isn't the easiest thing to setup... but as long as it CAN be setup.

5) The setup sticks around.  I dont' want to calibrate it ever few days.  I would MUCH prefer a harder configuration that will be perminent.

the distance isn't a big deal to me (I have the other lcdtopgun... and would love to get closer)...

[RandyT]

The camera chip has the image processing built-in and sends an X-Y position back to the CPU for each LED detected on the bar. Only one LED is really needed for a gun since rotational motion is not required.

I would think more than one LED would be required.  Otherwise, the accuracy would be affected by  not holding the gun (camera) perfectly vertical.

And like Julian stated, the Top-Gun LED bars are constant-on and all must be "seen" by the camera in the gun.  One bar has 2 IR LED groups and the other side has 3.  This asymmetrical 5 group pattern allows their software to easily recognize the orientation of the camera to the screen.  I would surmise that the Sega system works on a very similar principle, but has more computing power in order to recognize and process more than one dot pattern.

RandyT

[TheAdMan]

A little late to the discussion

The idea of this poll was to get as many people and as many opinions as possible on what people want from a lightgun. - comments like yours are exactly what I'm looking for.

[RandyT]

I just did a bit of research on the Wii remote system and while I am impressed at what it can do, it's doesn't appear to be a huge leap in technology over what the Top-Gun is doing.  In fact, it looks like the Top-Gun is better in one sense in that the bars may be on the top and bottom or the sides, whereas apparently the Wii Remote "sensor bar" needs to be horizontal.

However, after playing with the Top-Gun for a couple of hours, I have come to a conclusion:  The Top-Gun must use a low resolution CCD, probably 640x480 or smaller.  This is based on the fact that  it cannot  provide single (or even double it seems) pixel precision.  The Wii remote, according to reports, has a  CCD that is 1152x864, or roughly 1 mega-pixel, which would be 3x finer.

Another difference is most likely going to be the scanning speed.  The Wii remote (again, according to reports) scans at 200 frames per second.  This will give opportunity for oversampling and averaging of the cursor position, making it more stable.  The Top-Gun isn't bad for stability (worse for me when the bars were horizontal, BTW) but it certainly jitters more than the cursor I have seen on the videos of the Wii Remote in action.

The Wii still needs a bar that appears to be about 12" long either above, or below your screen.  The system is no different than the Top-Gun in that if the bar is on top of a large screen, and you are pointing the camera at the bottom,  the bar may be out of the view and the system will not work.  So there are still the same type of restrictions with the Wii Remote as with the Top Gun.  They may not be as severe due to to the fact that the Wii uses a slightly smaller bar and most likely a better optical arrangement, but it's still there.  I have read that owners of projection screens needed to put the "sensor bar" in the center of the screen, or on a table in front of the screen in order for it to work.

There also seems to be no calibration for the Wii Remote, and have seen some complaints about it being "off" a bit in the menu systems.  This isn't important in the Wii menu application because you are moving a cursor, much like a dot with a laser pointer.  Light gun games require more accurate calibration, but this can be handled within individual titles, or in an eventual driver if used with a PC. 

FWIW.

RandyT

[RayB]

Also note there are issues [Wii controller] with sunlight interfering with "reading" the IR LEDs.

[TheAdMan]

Well the entire  industry seems to be moving in the direction of interacive/motion-sensing gaming, it's hard to imagine lightgun/shooting games won't soon see some kind of resurgence (even if modest). Eventually someone will figure out a system that works - whether it utilizes LED's or not.

some other thoughts:

the only thing that prevents a classic CRT lightgun from working is the fact that new displays do not draw the picture vertically and horizontally (I'm sure you guys know that), but what if someone created software that mimics the behavior of a CRT monitor - like when you pull the trigger this software would flash the screen the black then "re-draw" the screen white, thus enabling standard lightguns to operate. The software would just have to override the current display for that brief moment then place a mouse click/button press or whatever at that point on the screen - assuming the camera in a standard light can sense (or be modified to sense) the light output of an LCD monitor.

sometimes you find solutions by using old technology in new ways rather that relying on new technology to save you. 

[Fozzy The Bear]

sometimes you find solutions by using old technology in new ways rather that relying on new technology to save you. 

And frequently by failing to learn and understand how the technology works you can run yourself up a totally blind alley and think that you have a solution when it simply isn't one.

That again won't work for several technical reasons. You yourself already stated that the image on an LCD screen isn't built up by line scanning.

In actual fact, to detect the position on an LCD screen in the way you suggest, you would have to flash each individual pixel in turn to white then back to black. Assuming a fast 8ms response time (and the response time is different for every LCD screen) and a native screen resolution of 1024 X 768 it would take approximately five seconds to do that for the whole screen, making it totally impractical.

Also the light output from that pixel flash would be so low that the room lighting would look brighter to the gun than the screen pixel flash does.

You're full of bright ideas that can't work.

While it's nice to see this sort of enthusiasm, please try to back it with some actual theoretical calculation first. Otherwise, you're just writing science fiction.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[TheAdMan]

Damn Fozzy, I'm just throwing ideas out there, I never said I'm some technical whiz - you don't have to be so hostile. I appreciate your technical knowlege but your attitude is repulsive.


  ALL HAIL THE GREAT FOZZY, HIS SUPERIOR INTLECT SHAMES THE FUTILE COMMON MAN, PLEASE BLESS US WITH YOUR GREAT WISDOM!!!


is your ego fed now?
 

[aljupy]

Hi:

I will be very Happy if I can see other models of LCD Lightguns in the Market.

@TheAdman: To start well you should listen Fozzy, he is quite right, The WebCam on Top of monitor is not the Best way to play lightgun games with accuracy.

If Sega (From House Dead 1 until now) and Namco (on the last Time Crisis 4) Uses the Led Strip on the Screen IS NOT FOR NOTHING


I have the "RGT G1" lightgun from erealgames....this company was supposed to make the "FireHawk" for PC, but I believe that they didnīt finish that because It was the same than RGTG1 (for console)....I mean that the RGTG1 is quite Bad. Bad Accuracy, and lightgun players are limited to the frequency of IR emitters. Also, as you say....Leds on the LightGun are not "Sexy" 

Of course, LCD TOP GUN is not 200% Perfect when you buy it, but it is perfect if you:

1) -Add a Brighter Leds to play Longer Distances

2)-Add a Wide Angle lens to play Shorter distances (like 1,5 meters for a 20" monitor)

3)-With a good driver that lets you support "Infinite" players with multiple profiles. A built-in Mouse Driver on the same LightGun does the trick, but anyway, it is always Welcome some sort of application to support multiple profiles or multiple calibrations for different games.

[aljupy]

Downside of putting a Cam on top Monitor:

1)-Leds on the LightGun makes it horrible 

2)-Accuracy is worse than multiple leds on the monitor. I do not believe in magic with cheap prices 

3)-Multiple players = Multiple Ir frequencies (limited players). Ok, you can solve it with a Switch, but I think that is better that every LightGun is the player that you wish. Without any switch. What about 3 player games??
Also, it is easier for dumb users like me that if something happens to Ir Leds, just change the Leds for another normal Ir Leds And Go. I think I couldn´t change my "Top Gun"´s led if they would use other frequency instead of just IR light. Easy to Change

4)-To change some IR Led you will have to open your lightgun, instead of changing the Cheap led bar.  I mean if you need Brighter Leds or some Led is broke.

I repeat Myself: Led Strips on monitor are not Super-Perfect but I think that is the best technology for LightGuns (Namco, Sega, and Wii prove it)

See you!!!

[Fozzy The Bear]

is your ego fed now?
 

You come in here, behave like a complete tit head with your first post being a poll to persuade people they want a product that will never work and never be produced, fail to even introduce yourself properly, fail to bother to find out who people are and what they do for a living and why listening to what they say to you is a good idea, insult senior members of the forum, enthusiastically come out with technically impossible garbage and then wonder why I tell you to back your suggestions up with some reality and practical reality at that....

All this, you manage to do in the space of 29 posts.

Well Done!!  Welcome to the forum.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[TheAdMan]

Welcome to the forum.

Thank you, nice to be here.

[rovingmind]

has anybody else noticed on the current wii commercial, when the show shots of games on play you can see the lightbar, but when they take shots from behind the TV of the people "playing enthusiasticaly" its not there anymore?  I just thought that was funny.