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Originally published on 02/05/2002
Black and White is probably the most beautiful, and frustrating, game ever written for the PC. In it, you are a god, managing both little villagers and your earthly emissary, a towering creature (a tiger, gorilla, or other animal) that you must train, like a pet.
There are no menus in the game, and no buttons. You use the mouse cursor to manipulate items on screen. You reward or punish your creature, for example, by petting or slapping him (with quick horizontal movements of the cursor). To cast your godlike spells, you sketch runes on the ground.
A keyboard is hopeless for this program. So's a joystick. A mouse works acceptably, but it still feels like a mismatch with the game. But at CES, I saw a clever new input device: Essential Reality's P5 glove, a device you wear on your hand that tracks its position in space as well as your fingers in relation to each other. With this device, you can really slap your creature around, or gently pick up villagers, or wave a rainstorm into existence.
Data gloves are not new, but Essential Reality has managed to bring the retail price of the product down to the $129 level by combining Nintendo's PowerGlove technology (which didn't offer full orientation tracking) with its own.
The market for this product is unclear, however. It will initially be sold as a game controller, its most promising application. Essential Reality's David Devor points out that in 1988, Nintendo sold about 1.6 million PowerGloves into an installed base of 16 million game consoles. The market for gaming is much, much larger now. To launch the product, the company plans both a television advertising campaign and aggressive bundling of its hardware with games.
The P5, or derivatives of it, also could end up in medicine, music, animation, design, and the military -- figuring out which markets work will be Essential Reality's biggest job.
The company has raised no venture funding, but is completing a reverse shell merger to raise funds.
- Rafe Needleman
email: rafe-needleman@catchoday.com
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