Weebles wobble ...but you don't fall off!
Supervisor and coach
Sit down, and the chair is the controller. The seat moves and the frame does not, so shifting your hips left and right moves you on the display in front of you. There is nothing in your hands and nothing to pick up.
Put several in a room and network them, and what the other players are doing appears on your screen as well as theirs. Pong ran on the prototypes, which is the right first game for something like this: everyone already knows the rules, so the thing under test is the chair. A driving simulation followed, and other uses were being looked at when the work stopped.
Why a chair
New Entertainment was the R&D department at JVH Gaming, set up to find new amusement games, and it already had the ApartGame table behind it. That table was designed first for players with physical challenges and underdeveloped motor skills, and turned out to be something everybody wanted to play.
A chair is the same argument carried further. Sitting down excludes nobody, and shifting your weight is something the body does without being taught. The interface is not on the screen at all; it is the furniture, and what it asks of a player is that they lean.
Who did it
The Weeble came out of Debby Thebrath’s internship with us at New Entertainment. I oversaw the project and coached her through it.