December 2011
1 post
November 2010
1 post
October 2010
1 post
September 2010
3 posts
August 2010
1 post
July 2010
1 post
Gamepad memory game
The game controller project moves slowly but we’re definitely onto something. We’ll release soon an iPad/iPhone application that would correspond to a visual corpus to all the joypads. Each pair of pages will describe one of the 42 official joypads along with various data: date, brand, corresponding console, total surface, action button surface, d-pad surface, connector pin type, wire...
June 2010
1 post
April 2010
1 post
March 2010
3 posts
February 2010
1 post
January 2010
2 posts
December 2009
6 posts
1 tag
Object evolution
Two other interesting representation of technical objects evolution: taken from Mobile Usability; How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone. Both depicts the history of the Nokia UI:
Also interesting as a reference point, this representation designed by the Media and Design Lab at EPFL. It depicts the evolution of the Nokia OS menu structure over time (from the Simplex 6108 to the N95)....
button in other languages
Button, also referred to as: knoflík knap Knopf κουμπί botón nappi bouton dugme bottone ボタン 단추 knoop knapp przycisk botão пуговица knapp กระดุม düğme cái khuy 纽扣… in various languages
"button"
Read in 20 unusual control schemes on Gamasutra:
“Button: The simplest control possible, and by far the oldest given its use in pinball machines. It can either be pressed, or not. There are games that are controlled only by a single button, but that scheme mostly sees only specialized use. WarioWare Twisted has a mode where all the minigames are controlled by single button-presses. Buttons...
November 2009
4 posts
"Game pads are totems of a strange religion"
A quote from Selectparks that is inspiring for the project:
“Gamepads are totems of a strange religion. Boxed with exploding supernovas or depicted as craft at war in space, they’re always marketed as a kind of mythological vehicle. Some gamepads come embedded with glowing LEDs as though they were a magical item of arcane power to be discovered by the player in the flesh. Regardless...
d-pad ancestor
The electronic game called “Split Second” features an interesting ancestor to the direction pad. The four buttons are independent and allows the player to use different interactions for the whole set of games proposed by Split Second.
October 2009
4 posts
d-pad patent
This URL points to the D-pad patent proposed on August 18th 1987: “a four-directional switch which can be turned on and off in four directions, which comprises a base plate having a plurality of electrodes formed thereon, a key top having an indication showing predetermined four pressing directions in an identifiable manner, a support member constituting a fulcrum between the base plate and...
History of the d-pad
I tried to collect here various examples of projects that led to the direction pad. A preliminary version, from the US, is the Atari “Game Brain” (C-700 released in 1977). There were no joystick or joypad but it had a set of four cross-oriented buttons with a symbol in the middle (telling you that these buttons controlled direction):
But the first instance of a d-pad may be the...
Stick/pad hybrids
An interesting aspect of the gamepad evolution is the recurring return to prior metaphor. Although the stick and pad “paths” diverged from the beginning, several hybridization occurred over time. The two paths crossed several times over as shown by the examples depicted in this blogpost. The threaded hole in the center of the d-pad allows indeed to add a mini joystick which takes...
September 2009
3 posts
Playstation action buttons variety
Still in the collecting phase, which seems to be a never-ending phase. The saturday flea market in Geneva always provide me with good opportunities to buy weird gamepads. Today, we managed to buy some Playstation and PS2 pads made by Sony and third-parties.
Besides the shape/material appearance, what’s interesting and striking when you put them all next to each other is the difference in...
first contact with the artifacts
Having collected the objects themselves, the first phase of the project consists in figuring out what they would “tell” us. Actually, we have to admit that we do not have specific assumptions, questions nor hypotheses, apart from the intuition that game pads have something to reveal about human-computer interaction and design.
We spent a whole afternoon observing the devices and...
August 2009
6 posts
x-ray pad
Found at ravanderende. Sometimes you need to know the guts of the object to understand it more thoroughly. No idea about the potential use of this for the project but worth documenting anyway.
Configuration for pressing buttons