Every year, along with regular devices such as joypads and mice, some brave hardware company will release a new device that sets out to change the way you control your games. In the past some have proved useful, such as the Space Orb 360 (if you could get used to it) or the more recently released Strategic Commander from Microsoft. “Innovation” in game controllers hasn't always been a good thing,though, as anyone who tried out the NES Power Glove from Mattel will tell you. Well, this year the PC gets its own weird game controller – Use Your Head software. Used in conjunction with a USB camera, the software lets you control game movement by simply moving your head. I'm sure most gamers reading this are already thinking “what a dumb idea, it won't work.” Well, truth be told, it doesn't. However, I could never have predicted just how utterly terrible this motion-sensing software is for controlling games.
To its credit, the UseYourHead was at least easy to set up. You can set up the software to trigger four different key presses for each direction you move your head in, and these key presses can be set to “constant,” “pulse,” “once only” or “disabled.” It shows a little view of the live video taken from your camera and you have to line your head up inside a box drawn over the video image. Sliders at the side and bottom let you narrow or widen the “trigger area” – if you move your head and it senses that it's moved past the right hand line it'll press the key you've associated with moving your head right. If you're still a tad confused as to how this works, check out the screenshot below to get a clearer idea. The blue area is where the video would be – my camera decided to stop working after I'd tested Use Your Head – maybe it couldn't take it any more (like me).
After fiddling with the settings I jumped straight into a game of Unreal Tournament and promptly got slaughtered. In fact I ended up with a score well into the negative simply because I found things so hard to control. I wasn't expecting to play as well as I do with a keyboard but I was expecting at least get a few frags and have some control over my movement. Getting the software to recognise my head movement in one direction was a chore in itself – by fiddling with the sensitivity and the deadzone sliders the software either becomes very unresponsive or way too sensitive for you to be able to control it well, and it is always almost totally unpredictable. Either way you're going to end up with a sore neck if you use it for more than 10 minutes, and after one particularly grueling session with it, my neck felt so sore that I had to go lie down just to give it a break. The system is impractical and immensely difficult to use for even a few short minutes and if anyone manages to use it for over an hour without needing a long session with a chiropractor I'll be amazed.
In an attempt to make the software remotely useful I set it up to recognise the movements of my fist instead of my head. While this met with slightly improved results (meaning I could actually sometimes get it to change my movement direction when I wanted) playing it was still a tiresome struggle and left me with a sore arm as well as a sore neck, and the only way I could jump was by prompting a friend to press the spacebar when required since my left hand was otherwise occupied. I found that the only way to make the software even remotely useable was to permanently tip my head forward (to move the character forward) and control all other movement with the mouse, which of course meant that shooting things while maintaining some level of control of my movement was next to impossible.