Why Can't Motion and Rumble Get Along?

LifesBlood writes to mention coverage on GameDaily of a contentious controller-related issue. Kaz Hirai, SCEA's president, is claiming there is no rumble in the SIXAXIS controller because of prohibitive cost issues. President of Immersion Corporation Victor Veigas, on the other hand, disagrees. As the company holding the haptic controller rumble patent, he says that the technology could be included for a very reasonable price. From his statements: "If you remember, the day after they announced they were going to take vibration out of their controller I said that we'd be happy to work with them to solve the technical problem, and our engineers in less than a day had come up with three solutions; one is filtering and the other is processing and neither one is incrementally an increase in the cost. Both are using software to filter out the different commands--tilt vs. vibration--so that both can work side by side, and neither solution will add an increase to the cost of the system... We knew how to technically solve their problems and now we know how to do it without adding any incremental cost."

Comments

Re:Bad sportsmanship

[furiousgeorge]

Lets be clear here:

-Immersion owns some broad patents around rumble
-Immersion sued Microsoft + Sony
-****MICROSOFT SETTLED WITH IMMERSION, AND BOUGHT AN INTEREST IN THE COMPANY
-Sony won't settle over the PS2 (still before the courts), and pulled it from the PS3

This isn't news - it's propaganda from Immersion/MS to try to make Sony look bad. Even if Sony wanted to use it, Immersion/MS would probably make it prohibitively expensive. Sony can't win here, and MS is playing the press game perfectly. Zonk eats it up every time.

Re:filter? acceptable errors?

[masklinn]

The WiiMote looks really neat, but it doesn't come with rechargeable batteries either and it will require line-of-site to get it's X,Y,Z positional info.

Holy astroturfing batman!

• The Wiimote requires LoS for absolute positioning, which the PS3 controller cannot do
• The Wiimote also packs "six axis" accelerometers and gyroscopes, which means that it's fully as able as the PS3 controller when it doesn't use the Sensor Bar, and works over bluetooth only.
• Fun thing is, the Nunchuck also packs "six axis" accelerometers and gyroscopes, which means that the nunchuck alone has the same motion-detection abilities as the PS3 controller.
• And the wiimote has rumble, plus a speaker, plus 6kb of memory (the nunchuck doesn't have them)

In a word, idiot. In a phrase, you don't know what you're talking about, please shut up.

PS: the PS3 controller has no precision, it's only able to do relative positioning and relative positioning is known to be imprecise and errorneous over time, Sony doesn't have any magic wand to make these go away, and these issues are the very reason why the 'mote comes with a Sensor Bar: for some things (targetting, pointing, ...) absolute positioning is required.