POLL: LCD Lightgun

[TheAdMan]

Question:

a. Would you buy an arcade style LCD lightgun for ur PC that performed as good as a traditional CRT lightgun?

b. How much would you pay (MAX)?

c. What features/qualities would you look for in such a product?

[FatTrucker]

LCD Topgun

Without question the best and most accurate light gun on the market.

It works with any type of display and is fantastic with mame. Its much more accurate with greater compatibility than the old act labs guns.
It uses an led array for position (similar to the Wii) rather than flashing the screen. I have two of these and they really are perfect, you can even use it to navigate your mouse cursor around windows as it tracks in real time.

Also includes a laser targeting reticule and force feedback which can both be turned off if you prefer.

[TheAdMan]

Yeah I have one, it sucks. Mines sitting in an empty drawer.

Crappy LED strips that you have to somehow mount to your monitor/tv/wall, a rats nest of wires, crappy software - never really got mine to work, even if I did I wouldn't want to play a game 10 feet away from my screen. Besides Lik-Sang is now out of business due to sony lawsuits.

What if you had a gun that worked without the LED strips, and you could play your games 1-5 feet away from your monitor?

BTW, I ask because there is a great peripheral company http://www.naturalpoint.com thinking about entering the lightgun arena, but they are hesitant of the consumer base.

[FatTrucker]

If their product has accuracy, compatibility and ease of use then there seems to be a viable market since LCD Topgun is the only decent alternative.

The act labs guns do work with some games in mame but they are far from perfect and were only popular due to the complete absence of any alternative.

I understand what you mean about the topguns, it took me about a week to get mine calibrated and running the way I wanted, the good thing is that you only need to set them up once, once they are claibrated they work with everything, and persevering with getting them working (I use smogs third party driver) they really are an ace bit of kit.
They are now available from Play-Asia.

The distance you stand away is governed by the size of your display, the further apart you place the stands the further away you need to be for them to track the gun. I used mine with a 27" arcade monitor and the usable distance was about 6 feet, any closer and you aren't really aiming anyway.

Not sure what an alternative method might involve?. Flashing the screen only works with certain displays and certain games, and motion tracking requires an LED array although its certainly possible to refine it (like the Wii) from the slightly cumbersom effort with topgun.

In terms of mounting I simply used self adhesive velcro strips.

If a company can come in with an easier, neater and generally competetive alternative though there are thousands of mame cab owners and home users they can target.

[TheAdMan]

NaturalPoint makes a head tracking unit for flight sims, FPS, and race car sims, it uses a small camera that clamps onto the top of ur monitor and led's that clamp onto a headset, I believe they first developed it for people who don't have use of their arms and then adapted the technology for gaming use. http://www.erealgames.com was supposed to have released a PC lightgun this spring, they also use a camera and LED's in their arcade gun for PS & XBOX and were developing one for PC, but now it's postponed indefinitely.

Here are excerpts from my discussions with the folks at Naturalpoint (if ur interested) - basically what prompted me to post this topic.
-----------------------------------------------
naturalpoint.com wrote:

Hi,

Before I babble at length let me ask you a couple questions that we'd really
appreciate your insights on:

- How much would be willing to pay for a precise light gun that works with
any TV? What is the highest/painful upper end price point you would
consider?

- Any guess at the number of PC users (specifically) who are eagerly
awaiting a light gun?

- Can you suggest any sites focused on this, where we could discuss with the
community?

* Business Issues:
It has been our minds for a while. But past marketing guys who've passed
through our company have used light guns specifically as an example of how
specialized peripherals never do well on console game platforms (not enough
developers/games support them, so not enough people buy them).
Plus, most console peripherals are stuck in this vicious cycle of cheapness.
So they feel they need to sell it for less than $40 (because people don't
trust third party peripherals). So to get costs down, they manufacture tons
of them, and use the cheapest parts. (plus console guys usually have patents
on the proper way to make their controller components, so third party people
are forced to use crappy workarounds that don't work as well.) But only like
5 games will support the light gun peripheral. And classically, people have
preferred to buy periphals on a store shelf (instead of online), because it
suggests the company is legit (rarely true though). And getting your product
on store shelves is a very dangerous business gamble (delivering half a
million to walmart for example, and having to buy back any that don't sell).
So when not enough people buy it, that company goes out of business. And the consumers feel burned, and other companies grow more afraid of trying the same thing. So from the business side of things, there is concern.

But we're all about R&D so we are still interested.



* Technical issues:
- TrackIR currently has a range of about 1 foot minimum to 5 feet max (a
question of camera resolution mostly. You'd need LEDs in the gun, which
means a power source. If you try to use reflective material on/in the gun,
then a serious issue with illumination pops up).
Anywho, current TrackIR range means you'd have to be far too close for tv
use. We have new tech (in our OptiTrack product line), with a range up to 20
feet, but we sell these cameras for over $500, so it's doubtful we can bring
that to TrackIR/gaming at the roughly 100 price that gamers want.

- We can do precise 6DOF tracking very well. But figuring out exactly where
the user is in relation to the TV is tricky. We have to figure out how big
the TV is (if I turn the gun 1 degree, that means very different amounts of
target movement on a 17 inch monitor verses a 60 inch tv. And how far I am
from the TV also makes a big difference. And we'd need to figure whether our
camera is mounted flush with the tv screen or not. Etc.).
Usaully people use extra markers to establish a "ground plane" (by laying
something on the floor, or placing strips on the tv as you mention, or the
old LEDs you had to strap to your tv for the powerflove, etc.) to help the
camera figure out what kind of space it's dealing with.
We could get around this by asking people to enter data into software to
indicate exactly how big their tv is, and where the camera is mounted.
(maybe simplify it down to asking people to shoot at the 4 corners of their
screen so we can define it) But both of these solutions require work from
the user who just wants to plug and play, and require more development from
us to minimize the work from them.

Anywho. We appreciate your email, and are interested in this, so I wanted to
share most of our current thoughts on the idea. Please let me know if you
have any other questions, comments, or suggestions.
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After explaining that I was specificly talking about a lightgun for PC (and MAME) I replied:

A power cable connecting the gun would not be a problem, most lightguns use cables.
1-5 feet is a perfect distance for most users, even on my 32" TV/Monitor I wouldn't want to sit more than 5 feet away, that was the major complaint with the LIK-SANG Topgun.
At the moment most lightguns have to be calibrated to the monitor, usually multiple times in one sitting, this would be nothing new, the question would be how well does the gun stay callibrated.