After seeing an announcment that the upcomming Ubisoft game HAWX will have support for Philips's AmBX it got me thinking about peripherals that try to immerse the player further into the game. The AmBX provides rumble, lights, fans and sound for your PC to get the player more "in" the game. I have no idea if it's any good since it's way pricey but I see what they are going for. There's been a load of these thing throughout gaming history and usually they aren't that great, Power Glove anyone? As a kid I wanted one of those so bad.. ly(see what I did thar?) but I couldn't get a hold of one. I'm not even sure they were sold over here.

During the prime of the Playstation these kind of things where still around and I obviously fell for it. In this case it was also a glove. It's not the exact thing as the AmBX but I'd like to think they are aiming at the same thing: immersion. It didn't incorporate any kind of fancy motion sensing controls. It was just a hunk of plastic you strapped to your hand with buttons on top. The only remarkable thing was the d-pad replacement. The thing had one axis for horizontal movements and one for vertical located a bit further up on your arm. To use them you hade to move your wrist up/down and left/right to hit the different directions. It was really, really awkward and made my wrist sore. To no surprise I quickly went back to the Dual Shock.
I even saw an ad for some kind of shoe-controller(!) later on aimed at soccer games.



What I'm getting at here is: do we need things like the AmBX? Sure, it just something optional but will there be more of this kind thing in the future and will affect the console and PC market alike? We already have rumble in our controllers for the most part but it's not that common in PC gaming. Audio and visual effects are handled by the TV/monitor and sometimes surround. And a fan? I really think I think I would be quite annoyed with that thing in my face after playing PGR4 or something for an extended amount of time. I could see how PC games could benefit from some of the features as the keyboard/mouse combo doesn't allow for the same kind interaction as a gamepad.
So that's what I was thinking a little about and now I never want to hear the words "immersive" and "peripheral" again .