Time Crisis is bringing back the nostalgia with a new AI powered gun compatible with modern TVs. This kit from Achievement Electric will allow you to use light guns conveniently without needing to worry about acquiring an old CRT or tinkering with setups.
The AI Gun Con system comes pre-loaded with the original Time Crisis game, designed for all LCD monitors. The pricing starts at $89.99 for a basic unit and goes up to $119.99 for an arcade mode setup which includes a pedal controller.
Expect an official release date announcement soon as the Tokyo Game Show approaches shortly.
Would you want to know more about how AI is used in this device before buying?
Just to add some information, what’s innovative here is that they are likely using a traditional machine learning model (eg: neural networks) to identify the corners of the screen and infer the position the gun is aiming at from this.
Sinden is aiming to do the same thing, but using older techniques known as compute vision. It adds a white border around the screen and uses those CV algorithms to find this rectangle. It is not AI at all.
The reason Sinden is doing this is because it is much more easier this way (and so it is fast to compute, and very accurate).
Whatever AI they use, it will likely be either less accurate and/or be very slow (imagine situations with low ambient light and the screen turning black). I have seen a review in japanese from journalists who tried it, and the response time was not great (and the team wants to divide it by 2 before release, which will still be worse than Sinden).
Another possibility could be there is no AI at all, and they exploit specificities of Time Crisis. When you shoot, the screen goes white for 1 or 2 frames. You don’t need AI to spot this frame and do something very similar to Sinden without using any border.
At this point, it might be too late to move the « cursor » to the right location, but emulators nowadays are able to apply inputs in the past, and « replay » internally the last frames in the background so that you cancel the native input lag of some games (which can make them more responsive than games running on real hardware). They could use this option and it’s done. You have a system only working on games like Time Crisis with white frames while shooting, with no white borders nor machine learning model.
TLDR; if they use AI (=machine learning) as they claim, there will be no constraint like existing alternatives (sensors / white borders), but it will likely be less accurate / responsive. For Time Crisis specifically, it’s possible to come up with a solution without those constraints nowadays, so it’s possible they have no AI at all and use the term for marketing purposes.
So, what do they (emulators) call that feature (input lag hack)?