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The Little Ball that Wants to Take Over the Gaming World |
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By by 65 Degrees North
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Wednesday, 17 December 2008 |
 Juhannes holding Ball-it
We’re concentrating on casual and mobilegaming,’ explains Juha Rytky, the company’s CEO. ‘Basically people who play casual and online games.’
The product doesn’t make sense until he shows me just such a game. It is snooker, projected onto the wall . . . and suddenly the elegant simplicity of what is tentatively called the ‘Bluetooth ball’ become clear. It is a tiny wireless mouse. But unlike a mouse it can be held in the palm of your hand and it responds directly to your movements and there are no buttons in this piece of wireless technology. Everything is done according to tiny sensors.
You can rotate the ball so that it can communicate with your computer while stationary. You can move up and down, left and right, close or distant. You can also squeeze the ball and this allows you to do just the kind of things that squeezing would allow you to do in real life.
‘It is one-to-one’ smiles Juha. ‘It is interactive motion control . . . so it’s more like real life.’ It certainly is. You are physically playing snooker yourself. To push the snooker cue forward you push the ball forward, almost like in real life. It took me a while to get used to working it – but then it takes a while to learn how to play snooker. Once you get used to it, it is almost breath-takingly simple to do something that – in technology terms – is pretty complicated. ‘Elegant’ is the only word for it. And apparently the ‘intuitiveness’ of the device will be improved as more games are designed to accommodate the technology.
The potential of this technology for games slightly more exciting than snooker is immediately obvious. With different configurations it could be a virtual car-key, a virtual wallet, a means of helping doctors perform operations remotely. But Juha sticks with sport.
‘It means that when you play a tennis game it’s very close to reality,’ he says. But he agrees that it could be used to turn shoot ‘em-up games such as Doom into actual physical exercise.
‘If the ball was in your pocket then the senses would respond to your movements and that would be seen on screen,’ Juha adds. With all the snow and then melted snow in Oulu, I was immediately thinking of a virtual reality jogging game involving the ball so that you could jog pretty much on the spot but imagine you were jogging through a forest.
The applications of this amazingly simple-seeming invention – which replicates your movements so accurately – obviously spread beyond on computer gaming. But as a small company that is where Ball-it have chosen to concentrate their resources.
The main inventor is the company’s chairman, 34 year-old Johannes Väänänen. An Oulu native, he studied at the university and now bases his company in the city.
‘We wanted to make a mouse that would be like a ball,’ he begins. ‘When we started to develop we realised it had the potential to do a lot of other things. But we knew that the gaming sector was a huge market so we decided at an early stage to focus on that. We wanted to make a mouse with no moving parts, no buttons . . . just sensors.’
Some reviewers have claimed that the golf-ball sized device is too big or not intuitive enough. Johannes responds that, ‘The size of the ball has been designed for the maximum usability. A smaller ball would not feel nice to use in your hand . . . in some Asian countries it is very common and sign of "fashion" to carry tokens or gadgets with your mobile, many of which are larger than our ball.’
And regarding intuitiveness, Johannes insists that the ball is currently ‘the most technologically advanced device on the market’ and that ‘We will also introduce new kind of simple and intuitive casual games with our partner studios, that involve, for example, throwing the ball in air and catching it.’
The small company – of a handful of men – work in quite a small office which is cluttered with proto-type boxes for the ball and various balls – in many different colours. There is an even a translucent ball which allows you to just about see some of its workings.
And Oulu was the perfect place to do this for Johannes. ‘I’m from here and we have the infrastructure,’ he explains. ‘We have all of the resources in Oulu. It is the wireless city. There are many people working on wireless technology. There are factories to make the prototypes. We know all the key people. There are high quality subcontractors that can put it all together at reasonable prices.’
And a reasonable price is what the company has in mind when marketing the product to its business partners.
‘The Ball will be sold to you as part of your mobile operator deal or part of your on-line gaming package,’ explains Johannes. ‘The Bluetooth technology that it needs is built-in today in most laptops and mobiles, so. For PCs that don’t have it, Bluetooth dongle can be purchased for ten euros from just about any shop selling computer accessories.’
Ball-it hopes to get revenue not only from selling the balls, but also from the licensing fees it would get for software and games that work with the ball.
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