Mitsubishi Electric Corp has developed an interactive game technology that detects a player’s body movements and translates them into the character movements on the game screen. The Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory and Sega Enterprises Ltd demonstrated an interactive version of the puzzle game, Tetris, at Comdex last month in which the player can put his hand out to pick up a virtual brick, rotate it and place it in situ. Code- named NoStrings, the demonstration will also let the player make the character in the game fly by acting out flying motions, or make it do track and field sports, such as running, by carrying out running or throwing actions in Sega’s Decathlete computer game. NoStrings is composed of an artificial retina module developed by Mitsubishi and a real-time vision algorithm. The retina sensor detects simple details about the movement of the player and forms an image on the retina chip. The real-time vision algorithms are based on image moments, which are simple sums of products of pixel intensities and their coordinates; and optical flow, which is the speed and direction of the moving image. Using the features of the images extracted by the artificial retina chip, it recognizes the player’s body movements quickly, explained Bill Freeman, senior research scientist at Mitsubishi. The time required for image acquisition, recognition, and feedback to the game character is less than 16 millisecond, Mitsubishi said. Mitsubishi is working on the game with Sega, but said that there is no target date for commercial release. It remains a development project, but the goal is commercial availability. Although Freeman believes we could start seeing interactive games of this nature within the next three years. The Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory is the research arm of the US-based Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center.
