Feel the Pressure
In the real world, shooting a gun bears little resemblance to shooting pool. But in computer games, just about everything-fighting wars, flying planes, playing sports-is reduced to twitches of the hand and arm, communicated through the omnipresent joystick. Miacomet, a Springfield,Mass.-based startup, intends to change that. The company’s first product, a pool-game interface, consists of a U-shaped structure that accommodates an ordinary pool cue. A mechanism similar to the one in a computer mouse senses the cue’s motion; the faster you move the stick, the harder it “hits” the ball on the PC screen. A force-feedback fishing rod due out early next year uses motion sensors and reduction gears to give the feel of casting a line, getting a nibble, and hauling a big one onto the dock. Miacomet CEO Randy Hujar says that in the next year or so Miacomet will bring out specialized controllers for golf, tennis and baseball, as well as a stand-on platform for snowboarding or skateboarding.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.