Designing video-joysticks

This paper reports work in progress on the design of a video-joystick system. At first glance, the design of such a system might seem like a rather trivial computer vision problem. However, computer vision problems tend to be harder in practice than one initially expects. The paper discusses some of the need for such a system and some possible strategies for implementing it. The computer games industry is a multibillion-dollar global concern and currently shows a healthy growth rate. One of the poorest aspects of current games is the limited form of human input, typically via a joystick, flight-yoke, steering wheel or game-pad. For a similar cost to a good quality joystick one can now purchase a PCI or USB camera capable of capturing 30 frames per second (fps). Combined with the processing power of a modern PC, this raises the possibility of designing real-time “video joysticks”