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

Wrong question

[Chosen Reject]

I think you mean why can't Sony get along with Immersion? Apparently rumble and motion can get a long fine. Doesn't the Wii have both? Even if it doesn't, Immersion seems to have solved that problem.

Bad sportsmanship

[Jimmy_B]

Sony decides that including both a motion sensor and a motor would add too much to the cost of an already-too-expensive console, and rumble is out of style anyways. (You don't want rumble in a wireless controller because it's bad for battery life, and the current trend is towards wireless). So rumble is cut from the feature list.

So Immersion Corporation, bitter that they didn't get the contract to design the PS3 controller and sensing an opportunity to gain press, responds by badmouthing Sony. Real professional.

Immersion should STFU

[nowayout99]

Immersion beat Sony in a rumble patent lawsuit. Sony then removed the rumble from the PS3 controller. Ever since, Immersion has been literally trolling the internet and anybody that'd listen to try to petition Sony to now LICENSE their rumble technology. This merely being the latest example. You got your money, Immersion. You could have settled but you didn't. Now please STFU.

Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the guy saying there wouldn't be any extra cost the same one who wants to get paid royalties if they include it? How stupid does he think people are?

Without adding any incremental cost...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do Immersion's patent royalties count as incremental cost? And how much would they happen to be, anyway?

Good Grief

[BruceTheBruce]

I don't really care to hear about it every time the president of Immersion makes some pithy comment about how stupid Sony is for leaving the rumble out of the Playstation controller because he's missing the dumptruck loads of money it would have fetched him. Frankly, I've never been 'immersed' any further in a game because the controller shook in my hands, I've always disabled it, and on the slim chance I purchase a PS3 anytime soon I definitely won't miss it. That said, Sony has made some fantastically ridiculous statements about the rumble feature since deciding they don't want to pay for it, or rather don't want to make their customers pay for it on top of everything else they've crammed in their latest system. I mean, Blu-Ray supposedly adds hundreds of dollars to the unit cost and few gamers have been clamoring for it, but they sure as heck didn't let that stop them from adding it.

Cost/Benefit

[The Dalex]

Let's say it costs Sony $1 more per controller with rumble... that could be $100 million or more over the life of the console. How many sales will Sony lose by ignoring rumble altogether? I'd be very surprised if it was more than a dozen, or even one. Sony made the right move, even though it is probably for the wrong reasons.

Since when?

[tpemble]

Since when has Sony cared about their products being too expensive? They've always seemed to have the attitude that they can put whatever price they want on something and it will still sell. Not that it's a bad thing, but this seems to go against previous decisions.

Is it just a marketing ploy?

Sony would be stupid...

[Mark Maughan]

to license technology from a company that sued them over a patent as idiotic as a vibrating controller. Any dildo manufacturer could think of that. I'd be upset if they did license the technology, just as I am upset that Apple has licensed the use of Amazon.com's 1-click patent.

I don't want Sony to feed the patent trolls.

And by the way, filtering out vibrations at _known_ frequencies from motion data is also trivial and not deserving of a patent.

Correct me if I'm wrong

[thelonestranger]

I might be wrong on this (and I probably am so feel free to call me out on it) but doesnt the Wii use some kind of sensors attached to the top of your TV screen to triangulate the position of the controller while the PS3 controller actually uses tilt sensors built into the controller itself. Perhaps this is why the Wii can get away with using rumble without interfearance.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[masklinn]

I might be wrong on this (and I probably am so feel free to call me out on it) but doesnt the Wii use some kind of sensors attached to the top of your TV screen to triangulate the position of the controller while the PS3 controller actually uses tilt sensors built into the controller itself.

Not exactly.

Nintendo's approach uses two flavours of movement detection: the first is accelerometers & gyroscopes, just what Sony uses on the PS3. The Wiimote has them, and the nunchuck also has them, which means that both can detect tilt and movement along 3 axis (each). This gives them relative positioning, which most game on the Wii will use (Excite Trucks, for example, uses that).

But accelerometers & gyros are known to lose precision over time and go AWOL, which means that you have to recalibrate them pretty often, as in pretty much permanently. They don't allow fine absolute positioning of the controller even over short periods of time.

Yet some gameplays (pointing, aiming, ...) do require absolute positioning. This is where the sensor bar comes into play: games don't have to use them, but if they do they can detect the exact position of the 'mote in space (the nunchuck doesn't use the sensor bar), and use that to know, say, where the user of the console is pointing.

I don't know how many games will use the sensor bar, but I already know of a fair number who will: FPS (CoD, MP3) more than likely will and pointing games (Elebits, Trauma Center) will, because none of them can work with merely relative positioning, not enough precision, too much precision loss over time.