YEP! I had a Vic-20... "The friendly computer!" And had a tape drive. They are totally audio tapes and the tape drive is essentially a local modem for those who remember dialup.
I'm excited about giantbomb.com's new mobile-centric focus. I mean you guys have a good thing going, but why continue when you can fuck it up and embrace the latest trends?!
@jdp83: Do you think we'll ever solve the Wii/Kinect/VR thing of staring at a icon and holding down a button to select it? It's always been really clunky for me, and after spending so long try to make things go faster, it feels way too slow. Do we need to just start tracking controller and such in the space as well, so that there's some sort of tactile feedback?
Actually this was solved on the Kinect with Dance Central. The problem is no one else adapted it. "Hovering directly over for <X> seconds with a timer" sucks because it introduces a mandatory minimum time to interact with something and if a mistake is made, you have to reset that timer.
Dance Central challenged this by saying, "what if we used relative movement and looked at which hand you were using and changed interactions based on that?"
So in that game, you move your right hand up and down to cycle through each menu item, regardless of where your hand starts (the current relative motion direction of the user's hand changed the selection rather than having to hover over the item in simulated real space with your hand as its detected by the Kinect) and swipe left with your right hand to select menu items (which also animate to the left to further hammer the action visually as to what's going on) and simply swipe right with the left hand regardless of where that hand was.
If that sounds confusing, watch this to see what I mean. See in the upper right corner how the user moves his hand up and down and the menu selection changes based on that relative motion as opposed to the hand's absolute position? Then he just swipes to the left relative to that position to select the item. He doesn't have to hover over the item, he just has to make sure he moves his hand up or down until he's on the item he wants, then quickly slap it to choose it. It was BRILLIANT and the single greatest UX achievement made on the Kinect platform... that most people didn't appreciate or follow their lead with.
The Wii was not really a problem with how it handled control - not for the most part at least on 1st party titles. Smart interaction designers made sure that they allowed you to either use the remote as a pointer OR to flip the controller, holding it more like a traditional controller and just use the D-Pad to make selections. Not all did this, but Nintendo did it even on their main screen so anyone who didn't was lazy (but that was the name of the game with most 3rd party Wii development anyway #BringBackWiiWareJeffSegment).
In VR, pure "gaze" based control sucks, because, like with the Kinect games that weren't Dance Central, it means introduction of a mandatory minimum time of 2-3 seconds before being able to progress through a game menu. And it's even worse with VR because you inherently look at things when trying to decide what that thing means, so if you are deciding what button to press and are looking at it, but after looking at one of the buttons for 3 seconds, it gets "selected" anyway, it feels really frustrating.
On devices like Google Cardboard, this is a problem, because it has no other way to interact unless the application not only supports some external controller (99% don't) but also overrides gaze-based control.
It's less of an issue on Gear VR because it has a touch pad which is great because then you can just use gaze to look at an object, but still allow the user to tap to select. You can even introduce concepts such as swiping and scrolling with the pad. In the application I've primarily worked on for the past few years, Samsung VR (formerly Milk VR) [Android platform non-VR component][The Oculus Store VR component of the application can be found in their store on Android if you have a Gear VR's firmware installed on your Samsung mobile device], I fought to get touch-pad swiping and fast-scrolling in and make it relative to the user's face, so swiping or fast-scroll-dragging a certain direction correlated with scrolling movement direction in VR.
Same with the Rift and especially the Vive. Valve's "Big Picture VR" mode is an excellent interface that allows for multiple ways to select items, type, and interact using the positionally tracked controllers. My favorite experience is still The Lab, Valve's own sort of "Wii Sports" of VR.
Just wanted to take the time to acknowledge a well thought out post. Thanks, Duder.
Reggie misstated what show Tina Wood was on. It was G4TV.com (yes, like a website). She and co-host Laura Foy did indeed move over to Microsoft, though the former now uses her married name and the latter works off camera.
Can we all have a love-in for the old G4? There was some stupid shit on that channel, and goddamn I miss it SO much. I paid over $100/mo just to watch Portal, and whatever else dumb stuff they had going on.
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