Page 117 - DCAP303_MULTIMEDIA_SYSTEMS

Unit 6: Hardware

High-degree of freedom input Devices notes

Some devices allow many continuous degrees of freedom to be input, and could sometimes be
used as pointing devices, but could also be used in other ways that do not conceptually involve
pointing at a location in space.
• Wired glove
• ShapeTape

Composite Devices
Input devices, such as buttons and joysticks, can be combined on a single physical device that
could be thought of as a composite device. Many gaming devices have controllers like this.

• Game controller
• Gamepad (or joypad)

• Paddle (game controller)
• Wii Remote
figure 6.2: Wii remote with attached strap

imaging and video input Devices

Flat-bed Scanners
A scanner may be the most useful piece of equipment used in the course of producing a multimedia
project; there are flat-bed and handheld scanners. Most commonly available gray-scale and colour
flat-bed scanners, that provides a resolution of 300 or 600 dots per inch (dpi). Professional graphics
houses may use even higher resolution units. Handheld scanners can be useful for scanning small
images and columns of text, but they may prove inadequate for the multimedia development.

Be aware that scanned images, particularly those at high resolution and in colour, demand an
extremely large amount of storage space on the hard disk, no matter what instrument is used to
do the scanning. Also remember that the final monitor display resolution for your multimedia
project will probably be just 72 or 95 dpi-leave the very expensive ultra-high-resolution scanners
for the desktop publishers. Most expensive flat-bed scanners offer at least 300 dpi resolution, and
most scanners allow to set the scanning resolution.
Scanners help to make clear electronic images of existing artwork such as photos, ads, pen
drawings and cartoons, and can save many hours when you are incorporating proprietary art
into the application. Scanners also give a starting point for the creative diversions. The devices
used for capturing image and video are:
• Webcam
• Image scanner

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