Booster One – Headset with gyroscopes

I recently was contacted by the co-founder of a young Ukrainian company Sixth Sense Technology with an innovative new product for gamer.

Booster One is essentially a high-end headset with additional gyroscopic and accelerometer capabilities which give gamer a new layer of gameplay control. The headset can emulate mouse movement or keyboard presses by reacting to vertical and horizontal head movement, in other words by turning or jerking your head.

Although the product is designed for the normal able gamer’s the company is well aware of the benefits for the handicapped as they pitched me the advantages for a disabled gamer with only one hand. But as many disabilities limit the movement generally including the head, such as in my case, the first question I asked was of course about the sensitivity.

I few days later I received a reply. Apparently the gyroscope/accelerometer sensor is extremely sensitive and can react up to the smallest movement of 2-3 mm. Which is much smaller than I expected and would definitely suffice in my case.

To be thoroughly the headset is made of aluminium and includes a built-in noise canceling microphone.

Lately the eye tracking company Tobii also tried to give gamer new form of control with EyeX, but in my opinion eye tracking is still to complex and error-prone and the biggest problem is that it requires official support from the games itself.

Whereas gyroscopes and accelerometer of the Booster One are pretty straightforward and robust. In addition it doesn’t require any official support from the game developers. It is more like configuring a new game controller, but instead of mapping buttons to keys you map your heads movement.

The headset is currently in crowd funding phase on Kickstarter and will definitely back them. Maybe I could convince you too, if not maybe the following Gif’s will. I put the Kickstarter link below just in case. I guess you can tell that I am pretty hyped about it 🙂

CS:GO – Reloading & Changing weapon

DOTA – Scrolling

Links

Booster One Kickstarter

Official Booster One homepage

One more key

Being limited on the amount of keys I can press, every additional one is game-changing, especially when it can be pressed simultaneously. To understand the importance you must know that I can only press one key at once on the keyboard. So you may see that games which require moving and jumping at the same time are problematic for me.

I almost gave up playing Doom as moving and jumping simultaneously is a necessity. But necessity begets ingenuity. Since I already owned the Blue2 bluetooth switch from Ablenet which has 2 programmable buttons I started experimenting with it. In the end I found a way to use one button with my right foot. Intuitively I programmed the Space key to it which enabled me to jump with my feet.

So now I am able to press one key on the keyboard, use the mouse and press one key with my feet all at the same time, 3 in total.

On a side note the bluetooth switch is originally used to control a smart phone with only two buttons. As this is a rather specific piece of equipment it is quite expensive.

Links

https://www.ablenetinc.com/blue2-bluetooth-switch

Keyboard Modification

After summer 2013 where I lost a lot of flexibility and strength in my arms and hands I focused on games that are playable with the mouse only. Which meant mostly adventure games like Machinarium or turn-based strategy titles such as The Darkest Dungeon.

A year later I had enough of those games – I wanted more. Before my major setback I played most Blockbusters, primarily shooters and real time strategy games. I wanted to be able to play action shooters again.

I already had an usb keyboard that supported my wrist. I struggled a while regaining the ability to play shooters because my fingers kept slipping off the keys all the time. My left arm is not strong enough to keep my hand in place. In addition I couldn’t get a good grip on the necessary keys.

I thought a long time for the right solution to get a better grip. I got the idea that more surface area on a key would make it easier for me to grasp it. On the one hand to hold the fingers in position and on the other to actually press the key. Since I used the mouldable glue sugru before and was familiar with it’s properties I knew it was the right material for this task.

To achieve the desired result one of my assistants formed little sugru knobs a bit smaller than a finger tip and sticked them onto the keys I found important for gaming. After 24 hours of drying it hardened into a strong silicon rubber with a soft touch.

There are only 4 keys I needed to be modified. To be specific keys for basic movement W, A, D and interaction E. Now being able to easily get a grip on those keys helps me to keep the hand in position since I can rest my finger tips on the rubber knobs. You could call it my default gaming stance.

As I don’t have to worry about my hand slipping off anymore I was able to use my slightly more flexible ring finger to reach keys in it’s vicinity namely the keys Q, 1 & 2.

That gives me in total 7 keys I can use.