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Sony's PS3 Motion Controller Gets Demoed and Named
itwbennett writes "In a 45-minute press conference at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Sony announced its motion controller, officially named the Playstation Move. The Move consists of the Eye Toy (a camera pointed at the player) and a wand-like controller with a lighted ball at the end and a range of buttons on the shaft, writes blogger Peter Smith. 'Alternatively games can use two of the wands, or one wand and one "sub-controller" that has an analog stick (the camera is always required),' says Smith. 'If this is sounding very much like the Wii's Remote and Nunchuk well, you aren't far off (though at least there's no cable between the two parts to smack you in the face when things get heated).' Here are Smith's thoughts on the demo: 'All in all, the demos seemed OK, but I, at least, wasn't really blown away by any of them. That said, it's always hard to tell how well these systems work without actually trying them for yourself. You need to feel the connection (or lack thereof) between what your hands are doing and what's going on on-screen in order to be sure. For example, in the boxing demo the player did a quick spin move that led to a roundhouse punch. It's hard to say if his motion triggered a pre-set action (a 'combo') or if the system was able to track the controller that accurately, and was able to 'connect the dots' from when his body briefly occluded the wand to when it reappeared.'"
It'll have a rootkit ...
This sounds terrible. Sony already has the EyeToy. When it was originally created, it was a big thing, and they hired someone from NASA who was working on remote control of rovers using the human body. And it was some big high-tech thing. It turned out to be a cheap webcam and some simple software to see if there was motion at that point. They put absolutely zero effort into it. The Eyetoy was silly gimmick.
If this is sounding very much like the Wii's Remote and Nunchuk well, you aren't far off (
Really? It sounds totally different to me. An eyetoy is a cheap webcam with a limited frame rate and resolution. The Wii controllers can accurately determine position in 3 dimensions. There is good reason that this stuff has not been done with cameras. Cameras are limited - they need lots of light, the frame rate limits the responsiveness and accuracy, they can't handle things in the way, they can get easily confused. Accelerometers suffer from none of these flaws. Heck - at GDC there are tons of companies demonstrating motion-capture systems, and you can see the trade-off between quality and price by looking at the camera-based systems compared with the more custom solutions.
Image processing has come a long way in just a few years. But I don't think an EyeToy can even come close to what a Wii offers.
I suspect that Microsoft's Natal is using dual IR cameras or something, so at least they will have decent depth information. I'm skeptical that this can compete with the Wii either, but at least it looks like Microsoft is trying.