The U.S. military really has adopted game-controller-style interfaces for some modern systems, and there's a practical reason for it: a huge number of recruits already understand the layout instinctively. That can shorten training time and make controls for cameras, robots and remote systems feel more familiar.
It's not usually just an off-the-shelf Xbox controller, though.
Many are ruggedized military controllers that borrow the same thumbsticks, triggers and button layout while adding dedicated controls for specific equipment.
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TBH people who point that out as a plot hole have no idea how the space shuttle program operated. It was actually pretty common to send non-astronaut mission specialists trained by the company paying for the payload up with payload, as the person trained to deploy and operate it. This was, partially a PR thing, "if you pay NASA to send your thing into orbit, you can get a seat or two on the space shuttle with it!" but also from the standpoint of "If we send up these corporate guys as MSs, we don't have to waste an astronaut spending 6 months learning how to use this satellite they'll deploy and then never touch again."
The idea of training the oil drilling crew who works for the guy who invented the drill you want to send as mission specialists and sending them up on the space shuttle is not ridiculous at all, it's pretty par for the course for how NASA operated. It's the least bullshit part of the entire movie.
This practice actually caused some internal drama in NASA, because the mission specialist astronauts where angry that their potential flight slots where being given away to corporate workers with no experience in spaceflight.
The hull was built from a composite of, I think, carbon fibre and plastics, rather than the normal steel. That was strong initially, but after hundreds of load cycles it failed due to stress fatigue, which is why it’s not used.
Yep this.. it's not "because soldiers can already use them" it's because gaming companies have already invested all the time and effort into the R&D to figure out he best form factor to use for a handheld controller which someone may want to use for an extended period of time.
I mean... Game developers have been iterating on controllers for decades. Why wouldnt a military system come to a similar conclusion, familiarity or no?
The game developers would have conducted hundreds of studies, including dozens of extensively tested prototypes.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the military version actually cost less to develop - but the per unit cost would be far higher, as game controllers have hundreds of millions produced, while the military controllers have just tens of thousands at most
Just like grenades, they wanted to make them 3 foot wide triangle shape grenades, but the dumb American soldiers couldn't wrap their head around throwing them, so they made them like a baseball instead.
Yeah, unless you use the joycons solo (AKA sociopathy) Nintendo controllers nowadays basically use the Xbox format just with X/Y and A/B swapped. Valve, Logitech, and basically every company that isn't Sony uses the Xbox format now.
I'm not talking explicitly about only the four action buttons, I'm talking about the controller format as a whole - which the SNES controller is far off from. The GameCube controller is closer.
Sony invented the format... up until the PS4, their controllers were just iterations of what Microsoft adopted. They just swapped the joystick and d-pad to be "unique". Then that design worked out of the box with basically every windows machine with with minimal set up.
Controller design through the decades and the paired technologies that made those designs stick is a fascinating deep dive.
The N64 controller makes sense when you remember that it was supposed to be a bridge between 2D and 3D games, and there wasn't exactly a manual on how to make controllers for 3D games back in 1995. The GameCube controller is GOATed, and the Wii controller was only one generation of weirdness before they lines up with everyone else. Really should've stick with the GC design though.
Yep the N64 controller was a big leap forward for the time.. it just doesn't feel like that today.
Once gamers started doing things like using the C buttons for movement in games like Goldeneye it became clear that there were better options, but games like Mario 64 for example played completely fine on the N64 controller.
Oddly enough the whole thing stared with submarines. The US navy used a bespoke condole for the periscope with was something like $10,000 a pop until someone suggested a X-Box 360 controller which was obviously far cheaper.
The original ones that had sucky ergonomics were replaced in later console generations by better, more ergonomic designs. At this point its a mature technology close to an ideal formfactor.
Not for a while, but it took time to arrive at the (mostly) agreed upon design we have today. You ever see an intellivision controller? Heck even the original nes controller is pretty different from what we have now, not even counting Nintendo’s other whack job designs
More like companies already made hundreds of millions in investments over the course of decades to perfect the controller designs, and they are just piggybacking off instead of reinventing it.
That was before the 3D controller design had really be settled and there were a lot of ideas about using the trident for both 2d and 3d games that just didn't pan out.
Id rather have a madcatz than a Sony ps4 controller. Ive gone through way too many over the years. I still have my original ps1, ps2, ps3, Nintendo, n64, xbox, 360, Sega genesis, etc controllers. Its not me, sony made garbage controllers for the ps4.
Playstation/Xbox controllers are the culmination of decades and dozens of millions worth of investment to create something that's comfortable, ergonomic and so easy to use even a child can pick it up and use one at least passably, within minutes, while also being cheap to produce and deploy at scale globally.
If you reject your militaries using them because they seem "too pedestrian" then what's next? Banning steering wheels in MRAPs?
My country of origin (Switzerland) has a mostly only militia military. We use any skills that people acquire in civil life to that end in the military.
You work as a cook? you go be a cook in the military. You do HVAC? great, facility maintenance.
vastly cuts down on required training time.
So yeah, using skills or technology already present is a no brainer for any military force.
There was an army ad on TV in the mid 2000's that showed a young soldier flying a drone with an Xbox 360 pad. (Not like a modern drone, but the ones that were like gliders).
The US Navy has steadily replaced a bunch of control systems with off the shelf Xbox controllers since 2007. Even for people who've never played video games; they're more intuitive, comfortable, versatile, and far far cheaper (yes even modern controllers).
Yeah I'm guessing it's the same in the UK (it was a UK TV ad). I remember at the time being struck by it, but within a couple of minutes I'd concluded it made perfect sense for the reasons you've listed. I mean, the R&D and iterative development has been done, they're cheap, and they've been tested on thousands of different software applications by hundreds of millions of people.
I mean it's not really big news, nuclear subs have used Xbox controllers for years to control their parascopes. Plus if you go digging videogame equipment ends up being very good for other activities. Xbox sold a fuck ton of kenict motion sensors to scientists around the globe for their research projects and Playstation consoles have been used to calculate gravitational waves from black holes and a bunch other research projects. Videogame equipment is on the forefront of human technology because it's one of the most profitable businesses in the world so it ends up getting used in a bunch of other project. I mean why do you think GPUs are getting gobbled up by tech companies now? It isn't because they are playing videogames all the time but because GPUs are incredibly powerful processing units to run tons of calculations.
Yeah Steam decks are used for all sorts of random crap, turns out a mobile computer that includes both a controller and a touch screen is really useful in a ton of different fields, from military to robotics
A bomb disposal robot was on display at The American Heritage Museum in Massachusetts. Not sure if that controller is the actual one that’s meant to go with the bot, but I have the exact same model of controller at home and I believe the Oceangate Titan used the wireless version of it.
In the past they did, you can see pictures of it in afghanistan, but as it became more clear that remotely controlled drones were gonna be more of a thing, the US military started developing a purpose made controller, specifically for this purpose: last thing you want is to mess up a surgical strike op due to stick drift after all!
It's been done. But reality is that different systems need different inputs, and you can't really mod a xbox controller to such degree. Also when using weapon systems, you want to be actually sure that the controller works and things like safety mechanisms to prevent accidental firing work. These safetys are often actually mechanical solutions, to prevent like pressing of the input.
there's another reason. Console makers put an incredible anout of resources into the problem of "how can we best allow people to control complex systems with a handheld device?"
If you're trying to solve a problem, a good starting point is "find out who else had had the same problem, find out how they solved it, and copy them."
Or because Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo etc have already spent hundreds of millions on designs and layouts for controllers to be as comfortable and ergonomic as possible and they all converge on the same sort of thing, so makes sense to copy it because it's probably the best
It's designs that fit our hands. Baseball can't properly be played with a watermelon sized ball, just like a drone that needs to move in every direction in our 3D world can't be controlled with an NES controller.
This post is acting like the Xbox controller is somehow allowing them to tap into a skill set they already have vs the more realistic answer that video games have converged to a very ergonomic and intuitive design that is the best solution for multiple applications regardless of the operators previous experience.
Its not because they already know how to use em for christ sakes use your head...
Gaming controllers have already went through decades of development in usability, control and ergonomics. why create something from scratch when all the hard works already been done, a mature design is right there to piggy back off.
My mind went to the same place. The sub could be memed for so many reasons, but the use of a controller for the subs control systems wasn’t one of them
The controller itself isn't the problem. The problem is that they cheaped out even there to save 50 or 60 bucks.
Also, while there's nothing wrong with it in principal they were basically running it through a cludged together computer system when they really needed a custom board that hardwired the control logic.
It's not "to make them similar to xbox controllers", it's just a general ergonomic design for human hands that is proven to work well. How else can you imagine a controller to look?
They were using actual Xbox controllers before, guess the military industrial complex couldn't have them spending $60 on a controller when a much more reasonable $2k is approp
Someone once told me that the controls the engineers originally came up with were so complicated that not many people could operate them. Then, apparently, some guys in Afghanistan figured out they could connect Xbox controllers via Bluetooth, which made them much easier to use.
Never used it outside of a single day at CAX but I got to play with an EOD type robot back in 2009 and it used a modded N64 controller if I recall correctly.
You’d have to be pretty savvy to get it set up, but I imagine if you had the skill to do that it would work fine. I do wonder wtf kind of connector that is, looking at the cable.
There are numerous cases in the military, currently and for a long time now, where the controllers for vehicles/devices are literally xbox controllers.
No, you do not tuck the grenade under your chin and push it like a shot put. You do throw it in a “windmill” or “rainbow” overhand fashion like an outfielder throwing home instead of the way a pitcher throws, though.
The military industrial complex has spent decades trying to optimize user interfaces, so OF COURSE they're going to start using videogame controllers when the videogame market has cornered the "UI usability" issue with a universally loved controller layout, and modders in games have already used said controller layout to simulate things like drones and tanks and such, so why wouldn't the US military take advantage of this? They would, in fact, be quite stupid not to.
‘The grenade’ as people recognize it, the pineapple style fragmentation grenades, are not this, they are descended from the British mills bomb.
But the modern standard in the us is the m67, which comes from the t13, which was, yeah, designed to be the same shape, size, and weight of a baseball for exactly this reason.
There are obviously other grenades with different ideas of what’s best, but it’s not a myth.
Fun Fact: The original Mills Bomb, the for runner to the modem hand grenade, had instruction for it to be thrown like a cricket ball. Reportedly this instruction was given to US when they were first given the weapon but they did not know how cricket was played and assumed it was the same a baseball. They ended up throwing the bombs far to hard and there were repots of them bouncing back when hitting things like trees.
Yes and no. Yes, obviously grenades shouldn’t be watermelon sized and should by easy for soldiers to carry/throw. However, some grenades were intentionally designed to be similar in size and weight to baseballs to make it more natural feeling for soldiers and take advantage of any previous experience they had. For example, the T13 “Beano”
The beano isn't a good example. Only 12k were produced and never made it to be issued as part of standard kits.
The main reason the m2 and m26 grenades were discontinued was because of inconsistent fragmentation. The m33 was the first grenade they were satisfied with which lead into the m67.
The baseball shape of the m67 is purely coincidental.
That it was never issued as standard kit doesnt really detract from the point the comment is making, the intent was to have it be similar to a baseball, regardless of the resulting use
And I think the pineapple grenades with the long handle that other militaries use are better anyways because you can throw them from cover with the extra leverage.
That's one of the names for stick grenades that was common in WWI and II, I think. Or maybe just II? Either way, that's a common nickname for the things.
I mean, game controllers are also an example of already solving the same problems the army is trying to solve in a control device. No reason to reinvent the wheel.
IIRC the Germans were impressed, and terrified, of how accurately and long distance American g.i.'s threw hand grenades at them. Their bomb on a stick didn't compare.
So? They are using well known, accepted, ergonomic and well tested piece of equipment. Would it be also so strange that they are using the same toilet brushes everyone have at home?
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