25th anniversary of stick interface for 3D world play,

I don’t have the exact date when I thought this up so it might be a week or two out, but late 1991 certainly, so I thought I’d celebrate its 25th anniversary by blogging the idea again.

The idea was a simple stick with simple reflectors on it that could easily be tracked using an infrared beam and detector(s). Most tools and especially tools for making crafts or drawing can be approximated by a stick, and we all have a lifetime of experience in manipulating sticks, so they would be the perfect interface, and cost almost nothing to make. Here’s a pretty picture:

Stick 2.0

You can easily imagine how you could use such a stick to carve out a wall or a roof or a piece of furniture in your 3D world, or to play any kind of sports. Nintendo built a complex wand device to do this expensively, but really a simple stick can do most of that too.