Ball-IT to Health

Ball-IT OY, a Finnish-based maker of real-time wireless sensing solutions, has released some specs and has demo'd its new six-degrees of freedom (SDF) controller. As costs to produce motion sensing devices come down, we'll see more and more of these devices on the market.

Here’s the promising part: It allows you to rotate the ball along any mixture of the three axes, so that it can communicate with your computer or mobile phone screen while stationary. Additionally, you can move the ball up or down, left or right, or close to or away from the screen (see the graphic below). So when it’s used as a game controller, each one of these movements let the ball interact with a game in a different way — depending on how the game software developer chooses to interpret these movements in the game.

Other devices that boast 6DF sensors include Motus' Darwin and Sixense TrueMotion featured earlier. The author doubts the current version to make any big progress against the tidal wave known as AGSNTBM - "A game system not to be mentioned."

Ball-it’s dexterity is worth noting. I’m pretty sure something like it will emerge and become a big hit. Right now, though, in its current form, it’s too unintuitive. It can do so much, and is nifty in that way, but it’s almost as though it doesn’t do any one thing extremely well — it fails to demonstrate a “killer application,” and after all, who really wants to carry around a ball to communicate with their phone or TV?

Time will tell whether or not we can "Ball It" to a health.
[Via Venture Beat]