Using mobiles as spare controllers

[charlesr]

http://thenextweb.com/uk/2011/10/11/london-mall-gets-big-screen-multiplayer-driving-game-you-control-with-your-phone/

At first I thought what a waste of space, but then it got me thinking - some fun games for when your mates come round e.g. pacman Vs would be very easy to control via a mobile phone. And let's face it, most people have one and carry it with them everywhere, so it would be cool if you could control this sort of multiplayer game with them.

Of course this will never happen because peripherals make money.

[averybluemonkey]

I think this is one area that's really underexploited - I mean this guy even manages to play Quake 3 pretty well (once he's recalibrated it about halfway through the video):

One thing I do think we will see more of though are mobile phones becoming consoles you carry around in your pocket. Like with the N8 it has HDMI out so you can plug it straight into your TV and you can of course use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, so you could essentially rock up to any modern display and start playing even first person shooters without any compromise just by plugging in one cable. One of the neat things about the N8 however was it was the first phone to feature USB-on-the-go which means it can act as both roles from the USB spec. So while transporting a keyboard and mouse are impractical there's no reason why drivers couldn't be written for it for the wired 360 controller and then you'd be good to go - phone, console controller and a single cable and you have a console like experience wherever you travel too. For example:

EDIT:Almost forgot, Kinect possibilities : (pretty decent for a small research project that hadn't been running for very long at all)

[Family Fry]

This was preview while back of Kinect meets Windows Phone.

[Fader209]

What if you get a phone call whilst you are playing?

I think using the phone as a mobile storage device would be quite interesting, would save carrying around your 360 hard drive to a mates house for example if you needed the profile/data stored on it.

[Lebowski]

There have been a few games on the iPad that let you use your ipod touch or iPhone as a controller, scrabble let's you use the iPad as the game board and the phone as a tile tray its quite a cool feature if you have a few friends with ipods or iphones.

The incident one of my fave ios games (I found a bit unwieldy on the iPad) let's you use the tilt function of the touch or the iPhone to controll the little guy on-screen and it works so much better as your not obscuring him with your thumbs, (like you do on the iPhone) and your not having to wrestle with a device that feels to big.

[speedlolita]

Lag lag lag.

Hehe, just kidding. I know someone that uses a PSP3000 with CFW and some program that turns it into a human interface device as a PS3 controller for BlazBlue. Kinda neat, kinda lame.