Thursday, April 7, 2011

Blobo to fight blubber? Finland's Squeezable Exergame controller

The Finnish company Ball-it has a buttonless controller and for its own game console that is played on a PC or Mac.  It's been on sale since 2010 but I haven't seen any ads for it in the US or on store shelves.  I wonder what their marketing strategy is for the US?   Currently at their website you can buy the console and Blobo squeezable controller that connects (PC, Mac) via Bluetooth for 60 EUR. A six-degree of freedom controller plus a pressure sensor amounts to what some people are calling a seven-degrees of sensing device that reacts to your movements while holding the device, while the device is tossed in the air, or when it is squeezed.  


The first suite of games (6) looks similar to Wii Play or Wii Sports and altogether it looks to be about 12 games in total, including: sack-race, hulahoop, long-jump, football, and ski-jump.


I haven't seen any studies done on this device yet but I would imagine it would be in the LPA to MPA zones.


Features:

  • triaxial accelerometer (STMicroelectronics LIS3LV02DL)
  • magnetometer (Aichi Steel AMI302)
  • pressure sensor (STMicroelectronics LPS001DL)

This is the only device besides the KiloWatt and Sqweeze (formerly of IA Labs) that features a pressure-sensitive controller, although on completely different scales.  This one I believe is the first hand-held pressure sensitive controller and I am excited to see its components be refined and further developed into  other controllers, interfaces and gameplay.


Will you Throw it! Swing it! Squeeze it! to better health?




2 comments:

  1. Sounds interesting. I see a game costs about 12,90 Euro. Are Euro listed using comma instead of dot or is it like 1290 Euro? If it is 1290 Euro, that's a lot of $$!

    ReplyDelete
  2. At 1290 Euro, they'd be uber-rich!
    I think 12,90 EUR is for 12 games but with the controller and "console" you get the original 6 games.

    ReplyDelete

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