U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines
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Re: U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines
#2That's great. Those controllers are awesome, durable, easily replaceable, cheap, portable, intuitive, and have undergone an ungodly amount of user testing. Most importantly the recruits will typically have experience having used them in the past.
Re: U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines
#3> “I can go to any video game store and procure an Xbox controller anywhere in the world, so it makes a very easy replacement.”
Or the Rec room.
Re: U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines
#4While they're not likely to be the best control experience you can possibly get for a given application (as any serious FPS or fighting game player can tell you), the mainstream official console controllers really are engineering and design feats in their own right. This is one of those things where getting it 90% right is easy but the last 10% will make people hate using it.
Re: U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines
#5> “I can go to any video game store and procure an Xbox controller anywhere in the world, so it makes a very easy replacement.” Or the Rec room.
I fear the day when a controller in the rec room breaks, and they realize that the reverse is also true.
Re: U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines
#6This is one of those simple ideas that makes a lot of sense. I'm glad to hear there are teams working to reduce costs and improve UX for the military.
Microsoft obviously did a lot of user testing with their controller, but they must have been optimizing for a certain consumer price point as well. It makes me wonder what sort of controller you would have if they spent all that focus on usability, but with the same $38,000 price tag the periscope control panel commands.
Re: U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines
#7I also am one to agree that I think this is a great step forward with maybe trimming off our huge military expenditures, particularly ones that come out as "leaks" because they are so embarrassed of them.
I'm sure the U.S. navy will be taking a look at the hardware and maybe even flashing their own firmware on them, lest we open ourselves up for a catastrophic backdoor.
Re: U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines
#8This is one of those simple ideas that makes a lot of sense. I'm glad to hear there are teams working to reduce costs and improve UX for the military. Microsoft obviously did a lot of user testing with their controller, but they must have been optimizing for a certain consumer price point as well. It makes me wonder what sort of controller you would have if they spent all that focus on usability, but with the same $3…
Once you add the cost of adapting the periscope HW/SW and organizing + performing a one-off small run of XBox controllers on a US-only supply chain with military markup at each level, I suspect those "XBox controllers" cost closer to $30k than $30.
Re: U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines
#9> “I can go to any video game store and procure an Xbox controller anywhere in the world, so it makes a very easy replacement.” Or the Rec room.
I fear the day when a controller in the rec room breaks, and they realize that the reverse is also true.
$30000/$30=1000 replacement '360 controllers.
Now you just need space for all of them.
I guarantee that for something as fundamental as the main periscope control, _everything_ is going to have replacement parts. That's why $30k is so expensive, it's not $30k, it's $60k or $90k or $120k. Now they have the kind of problem that's fun to have: for half or quarter of the cost of replacing that proprietary controller, they can have so many '360 controllers they won't be able to store all of them on board.
Re: U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines
#10I also am one to agree that I think this is a great step forward with maybe trimming off our huge military expenditures, particularly ones that come out as "leaks" because they are so embarrassed of them. I'm sure the U.S. navy will be taking a look at the hardware and maybe even flashing their own firmware on them, lest we open ourselves up for a catastrophic backdoor.
In the overall cost of the periscope, I'd be surprised if the original $30K controller was even 1% of the total. It's still $30,000 saved, but in the scheme of things this sort of economizing is not going to have any impact.
What's more important is they found a more familiar, intuitive, hence better controller device. That it was also much cheaper was just a little bonus. If the savings in training hours are to be believed, that will be a much greater savings than the cost of the hardware.