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

Strategic feature removal

[0x15e]

Hirai says they're removing the technology the consumer doesn't really need so they can make it more affordable. That makes perfect sense in context, don't you think?

Re:Strategic feature removal

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to let you in on a little secret:

The Wiimote costs a lot more to produce than the PS3 controller, because the Wiimote has more technology (3 Axis accelorometer, 3 axis gyroscope, 3d-position detection, IR/UV sensor, Rumble, Speaker, Wireless interface, Wired add-on interface, etc.) and Retailers have the same mark-up on both controllers; so yes Sony is cutting back features to increase their margin.

The question is why did Sony drop the Rumble feature (which has some value in a gaming system) yet retain the Blu-Ray player which greatly increases the cost of the system and offers very little benefit to gameplay (nothing that couldn't be made up by printing a second disk).

Re:Strategic feature removal

[twistedsymphony]

IIRC the only multi disc PS2 titles were on two single layer DVD5 discs because early PS2 units had problems reading information on the 2nd layer of DVD9s. I can't think of any multi disc Xbox 1 games... and actually there were only 3 Xbox 1 games that required the 2nd layer after you got rid of game demos/videos and other unnecessary crap. Jade Empire, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, and Rally Sport Challange 2 all spilled over onto the 2nd layer. Jade empire and RSC2 only spilled over by less then a gig, and MGS2 Substance on the PS2 was 2 discs with the 2nd disc includeing specail feature and behind the seens stuff, for the Xbox Version they squeezed it all onto one disc but it could have easily been two single layer discs without any kind of disc swapping or removing from the gameplay.

There were only a small handful of GC games that used more then one disc, though I think it's important to note that the GC discs were ONLY single layer and held about 1.4GB of data... essentially 2 CDs. Meaning that the LARGEST of the GC games were about the same size as the largest PS1 and Saturn games.

Lets not forget that with new codecs for audio and video those elements are taking up a fraction of the space. Also there is new texture compression that apprently reduces texture sizes up to 70% without quality loss. It would be interesting to see how the disc size requirments would change for a game like Oblivion had that tech been availble when it was first released. Apparently it's being used on some upcoming XBLA games that are using the U3 engine for fully featured games under 50MB.

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.

Why can't...

[no reason to be here]

Wii be friends? Why can't Wii be friends? Why can't Wii be friends? Why can't Wii be friends?

(With apologies to War)

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.

Re:Bad sportsmanship

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"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."

Bitter that they didn't get the contract, or bitter because Sony blamed their technology over reasons that were correctable?

Sony should just have said "we wanted to keep costs down."

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.

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.

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.

Sixaxis

[MeanderingMind]

There have been arguments concerning the "Sony just threw this together" controller stating that Sony had a patent for the tilting technology in the controller many, many years ago. The argument is that Sony couldn't have just copied Nintendo because they had the technology for the controller so long in advance and the functions of the two companies' controllers are vastly different.

For a while, I was willing to accept that argument. I didn't agree with it, my own feeling from watching the Sony E3 conference being that Sony was trying to take some wind out of Nintendo's sails, but I didn't consider it worthwhile to argue against.

However, the shenanigans involving the rumble feature suit and its sudden removal shortly thereafter, while circumstancial, only reinforce the perception that Sony's version of events isn't what they say it is.

I'm not compelled to believe that Sony actually had planned the Sixaxis controller well in advance when it unnecessarily removed a previous key feature, and seemingly mimicked Nintendo's controller. It doesn't help that Sony waffled about what online service they'd have, giving the perception they were only doing it to be able to say, "We have internet gaming too" at Microsoft. It really doesn't help that after ridiculing Microsoft's two separate packages Sony did the same thing. They say they "Don't care" about Microsoft and Nintendo, but all of the circumstances and coincidences tell a different story.

I'm not against the Sixaxis controller and I know a lot of people who dislike rumble anyway. What I am against is being treated like an idiot (regardless of whether I am or not), as most self-respecting people are. The whole deal feels like Sony is trying to pull a fast one, and that's a bad feeling. Were it just a couple of things that felt this way I wouldn't care so much. However, when everything that comes straight from the horse's mouth breathes of contempt for me and my intelligence, and only smells of greed for my dollars...

I wish Sony well, I just wish they could do something to restore my faith that they're honest.

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.

How many solutions?

[nebbian]

...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.

(emphasis mine)

Errr... 1 + 1 = 3 now?

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.

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.