Discovery Bay Games (DBG) focuses its efforts on making accessories for iOS devices and enhancing gameplay possibilities. Already the company has had success with its Atari Arcade device, which turns an iPad into a mini arcade machine. It also has a Dora the Explorer “backpack” that interacts with an iPad app. This fall, the company will release new products that do even more to make the iPad like a traditional console.

“Gameplay in iOS can be made better with physical devices,” the DBG chief executive officer Michael Sievert told VentureBeat. “iOS is the fastest growing game platform we’ve ever seen, and we’re taking advantage of that trend.”

Joysticks?

Yup. Maybe they can buy Thiel fellow / YC-backed startup coco controller: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/games/the-coco-controller

It's 2012, we live in a post-Wii, post-Kinect era.

Can't we do better than Joysticks and Coco Controllers?

I believe I saw a company doing motion controls for mobile gaming...

It is ironic that the touch-screen device gets physical hardware for gaming :)

The real test, in my opinion, is whether <18 kids feel they need or want the physical hardware. My small sample size says that no. My gut used to say yes, but it's impossible to ignore how younger people play games.

Yes, hardware seems like a 20th century relic.

The new new thing is... nothing.

Interesting comments vis-a-vis Leap Motion on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416361

Please, for the love of Jef Raskin and Henry Dreyfuss and Don Norman and all that is human factors, no.

The film version of Minority Report was not a model for practical or usable interface design. Millions of years of evolution have built our brains and bodies for interacting with things that provide physical feedback when we touch them. Waving a pencil in the air, "manipulating" an invisible item and looking for visual feedback from a screen, these are not good experiences. Even if you discount the "gorilla arm syndrome" that StavrosK quite rightly points out here, the fatigue of trying to perform fine and accurate motion without physical stimuli for your hands and fingers to respond to is significant.

I'm sorry to be a negative voice in the face of innovation, but this really does feel like a technology in search of a problem. What worries me greatly is that it has a remarkably high "cool factor" that would be excellent in short demos, and could be easily pitched to companies looking for a flashy feature to get a leg up on the competition. We were saddled with some dubious decisions at the dawn of the GUI age, and we're just starting to lose them as we enter the Direct Manipulation age of interfaces. Please don't let this concept of feedback-free hand gestures become a paradigm that we're stuck with in the future.