The Chiz

Real-time strategy games have historically had a difficult run trying to break into the console market.  Over the last couple of decades of popular home console use, there have been multiple RTS releases and ports, though they are almost always poorly recieved when compared to their PC counterparts.

Although there are multiple reasons for this struggle, the most prominent setback was and continues to be the control interface. While most games use controls for view and character movement, strategy games use the control interface to quickly select and deploy potentially dozens of units in rapid order. While the mouse is perfectly suited for this, console controllers lack in both the speed and precision department.

This brings me to the console-exclusive Tom Clancy’s EndWar. The up-and-coming release is a tactical strategy game that offers the player a deep voice-recognition system used to control multiple units. With the headset on, the player can bark orders such as “Unit 2 attack hostile 1″, or “Unit 4 secure Foxtrot”, and have your on-screen soldiers acknowledge your orders via the headset’s earpiece.

Although the voice commands are pre-made and compartmentialized by the Ubisoft developers, they are complex and specific enough to be able to do anything from having one unit defend another, to ordering your camera to follow a mobile helicopter unit. The fact that the voice commands were designed to recognize proper sentence structure makes the voice-command system feel even more natural.

Unlike other voice-activated software, EndWar requires very little voice training. In fact, during the demo’s setup phase it felt as if the program was training me, as opposed to me training it. The complexity and range of the recognition software is demonstrated by this video demo, where the game recognizes commands uttered by a pair of trained parrots.

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On the topic of unique control mechanisms, hardware manufacturer OCZ has a device on the market that has been dubbed the “Neural Impulse Actuator”, or NIA. What the NIA consists of is essentially a rubber headband with diamond-shaped sensors on it. This headband connects to box that is used to translate the headband’s readings into keyboard bindings, that are then fed to your compute via USB input. Using a combination of electro-encephalogram, electro-myogram, and electro-oculogram technologies, the NIA can be used to pass up to eight different input binds to your computer without having to actually touch another input device. It’s sensors measure facial muscle tension, ocular movement, alpha brain waves, and beta brain waves to literally read your mind and your physiological impulses, which are then used as control mechanisms.

With a fair amount of training, the NIA can be taught to translate various types of thought (aggressive, pain management, etc) into usable input. This means that you can have it translate a tensing of your jaw muscles as a jump command, or a sideways glance as a look command. Using the alpha wave sensors, you can have the NIA translate an aggressive thought such as swearing into an input, as well. The lowest price I have found this for is about $120, and the highest is about $300. In it’s current iteration, however, the software will only recognize keyboard input. This means that you will still have to use the mouse if you want to get much PC gaming done with it.

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