In a press release that was put out yesterday, the news has come along that a company called “Titan 4 Games” is now working with a company called Softkinetic to develop “next generation, gesture-based coin-operated systems.” From the sounds of it, the technology which is called “iisu” is similar to what Microsoft will be doing with their Project: Natal device as is suggested by this part of the press release:
Using a 3D depth sensing camera, Softkinetic’s iisu™ middleware analyzes the player’s movements, detects body parts and recognizes specific gestures. It also provides a complete 3D avatar animation environment so that the player controls the gameplay experience directly through his gestures.
After doing a little research on the company Titan 4 Games, I could not find out much other than the current CEO, Milind Bharvirkar is a former CEO of GlobalVR. The press release claims that the team from Titan 4 Games has developed 19 products which have been voted number 1 but I cannot find out what those products were. My guess is that they are suggesting that the people on the team have been involved in coin-op projects in the past, just not ones released by this present company or I imagine that we would have heard about T4G before now.
The press release is promising that we will begin seeing iisu enhanced coin-op games in the first half of 2010 so we will certainly keep an eye on this development. As we have mentioned many times before, this isn’t the first time the arcade industry will have dabbled in motion sensing technologies although depending on how T4G applies this, we could see some interesting games come out of this.
In regards to the technology being discussed here, I found a couple of videos that show Softkinetic’s technology in action.
