Qmotions

True story: I was a skate rat/surf punk during my early to mid teens. So when I heard about QMotions' new invention, the Xboard, I was, like, totally stoked. QMotions has been around for a couple of years and is most notable for its QMotions-Golf product, a full motion game controller that lets players use real golf clubs to strike a simulator ball for video games such as EA Sports' Tiger Woods PGA Tour. In fact, Dale Hutchins, CFO and COO at QMotions, told me that the company brought the product to the PGA Tour Convention a couple years ago, where a few professional golfers teed off on the simulator. Since the product debuted in 2004, Hutchins told me, QMotions Golf has received strong reviews from both video game critics and golf experts. "It validates the product for non-gamers," Hutchins said. "We wanted to make a product that accurately translated your swing so that golfers could use it when they're not able to be out on the greens."

Now QMotions has two new products in Fun Fitness and the Xboard. Fun Fitness is a fairly simple device; attach it to pretty much any recumbent exercise bike, patch the cords into your Xbox console, and suddenly, the faster you pedal on your bike, the faster your video game car or jet ski goes on the screen. You may feel a little like a hamster on a wheel after a while, but QMotions-Fun Fitness is a great way to kill two birds with one stone.

The Xboard is more like QMotions-Golf; it's an interactive simulation device that's designed to act like a real skateboard or surfboard. I hadn't really seen anything like QMotions' sports simulators outside of an ESPN Zone - and I love ESPN Zones. QMotions-Xboard will be available this spring for under $100, according to the company, and it looks like a promising product. "My personal belief is that the Xboard will soon be our most popular item," Hutchins said.

So I gave the Xboard a whirl on the Xbox game Amped 2 (at least, I think it was). I quickly realized that A) I was way out of practice when it came to skateboarding, and B) the Xboard was a little small for my size 15 feet. I gave it my best, and it actually was a quite a bit of fun. Just like the Exer-station, the Xboard boasts amazing sensitivity and fairly quick reaction times, which made me feel like I had accurate control over the game. Of course, it took a while to get the hang of controlling the board, and I stumbled quite a bit (both in real life and on screen) before I could really enjoy working the Xboard. But even when I crashed, the Xboard delivered a much more authentic experience for the game - without the head injuries and broken bones, of course.

* Editor's Note: stay tuned for more from Toy Fair 2006