How will the Revolution sense the controller?

[Guden Oden]

Maybe, but the sender side would have to be a real monster. Won't work.

I could aim the PS2 DVD remote pretty much any way I wanted to (including the wall behind me) and still get the receiver to pick it up last year when I still used it for DVD playback...

Anyway, LEDs have become immensely strong these last couple years. If Nintendo wants to, they could likely do it. Just chuck in a couple more diodes in the sensor bar. I'd think the big risk would be to create so much background IR noise that ordinary remotes can't function, rather than not being able to send out a strong enough IR pulse for the revmote to sense...

Maybe Nintendo could use a IR frequency outside that of consumer electronics remotes. I guess there's some standard regulating that after all...

 

[_xxx_]

Guden, that's not an option. That will work in a room, but it will never work in a bigger hall or at the balcony, for example. That's a killer already.

 

[Squeak]

Well after thinking about it more,I think they will try and make the bar itself do most of the work. The more tramsmitting and sensing they can offload to the bar the better for reliability and battery life.

But the worse the all important precision.
The longer you get away from the sensorbar, the smaller the movements of the user is going to seem, so precision will consequently drop.

 

[Guden Oden]

But the worse the all important precision.
The longer you get away from the sensorbar, the smaller the movements of the user is going to seem, so precision will consequently drop.

The readings from the accelerometers won't change just because you stand further away. That means distance can be accounted and compensated for.

 

[Squeak]

The readings from the accelerometers won't change just because you stand further away. That means distance can be accounted and compensated for.

Nintendo never said anything about accelerometers. The IR sensing tech is for movement in x, y and z and the gyros is for detection of rotation.

 

[Teasy]

http://revolution.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=6601

 

[pc999]

http://revolution.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=6601

That is really good, if true.

 

[Teasy]

I've got the issue of Edge Magazine that did a cover story on Revolution and in that article they talk about the attachment also sensing movement. But until now no other article I'd seen backed that up.

 

[OtakingGX]

Where did anyone suggest that the IR window is used for the datatransfer? The discussion was about whether it was used as an emitter or receiver of an IR positioning signal.
It would be very weird and expensive to have an IR receiver/emitter just for the hell of it, like you are suggesting, it has to play a very important role.

What you are suggesting with the radio wave triangulation, which takes advantage of doppler effect and/or delay, might work on a large scale, but is impossible or prohibitively expensive for consumer equipment.
And even if they did do this, why not just have the third sensor seperately (in the Revolution even), instead of wasting battery life?

I'm not sure what exactly an "IR positioning signal" is. Regardless, such a system would only work with the controller pointed in the direction of the sensor bar. Infrared signals will bounce, so if the controller is an emitter, there's now way to tell where the signal is coming from when you point it to the left and it bounces around off your walls. I doubt we all want to paint our walls black in order to play console games...

Transmission for a doppler effect system doesn't have to use a lot of power. In fact, it's probably possible to use the existing Bluetooth traffic that the controller is sending yaw, pitch, and roll data over, to locate it in 3D.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Transmission for a doppler effect system doesn't have to use a lot of power. In fact, it's probably possible to use the existing Bluetooth traffic that the controller is sending yaw, pitch, and roll data over, to locate it in 3D.

Exactly. If you're already sending that data via Bluetooth, use the exisitng signal.

Does someone have a link to the official announcement(s) about the Rev's controller scheme? I can't remember if they mention Bluetooth, IR, or any other comms methods.

 

[NANOTEC]

IIRC Nintendo said it uses BT.

 

[_xxx_]

http://revolution.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=6601

F*@#ing proxy!!! Short summary of that article, anyone?

 

[Rodéric]

F*@#ing proxy!!! Short summary of that article, anyone?

It's about the same as this one :
http://www.revolutionreport.com/articles/read/402

 

[_xxx_]

Thanks!

 

[Squeak]

I'm not sure what exactly an "IR positioning signal" is. Regardless, such a system would only work with the controller pointed in the direction of the sensor bar. Infrared signals will bounce, so if the controller is an emitter, there's now way to tell where the signal is coming from when you point it to the left and it bounces around off your walls. I doubt we all want to paint our walls black in order to play console games...

A flashlights light also bounces of the walls, but you have no trouble determining what is the flashlight and what is wall. That's because you have lenses in front of you photoreceptors.
Revmotes IR sensor/camera would also have a lens and appropriate software for filtering out the weak reflected light from the two main sources

ransmission for a doppler effect system doesn't have to use a lot of power. In fact, it's probably possible to use the existing Bluetooth traffic that the controller is sending yaw, pitch, and roll data over, to locate it in 3D.

You still didn't answer the qustion about why they would include an IR eye just for on/off (which could be achieved through bluetooth anyway ).

I've never heard of a consumer application of doppler effect measuring technology. Do you have any examples?
It just seems obvious to me, that the tiny movements you are going to make with the controller and the resulting minuscule compression/stretching of the waves will be way out of the capabilities of consumer grade equipment to measure.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

A flashlights light also bounces of the walls, but you have no trouble determining what is the flashlight and what is wall. That's because you have lenses in front of you photoreceptors.
Revmotes IR sensor/camera would also have a lens and appropriate software for filtering out the weak reflected light from the two main sources

Um, no. Not by a long chalk. The reason the light from a torch or bouncing of a wall can be differentiated by me is an incredibly complex data comparator/processor. The actual photons, if of the same frequency, I can't differentiate between.

There's no such thing as a lens that'll filter between light from source at wavelength x and light reflected at wavelength x. You could try using polarised light for the transmission and similarly detecting the polarized light at a receiver, accounting for the angle of reflected light to cause it to be filtered out. I don't know how well that'd work.

I've never heard of a consumer application of doppler effect measuring technology. Do you have any examples?
It just seems obvious to me, that the tiny movements you are going to make with the controller and the resulting minuscule compression/stretching of the waves will be way out of the capabilities of consumer grade equipment to measure.

Is doppler the only useable method though? I'm no RF engineer so could be off on what's doable affordably, but hows about sending a signal pulse every say 300th of a second, and measuring the time difference between that pulse arriving at receiver 1 and receiver 2? Also as I see it, the two receivers are more for large movements in the 3D playing field. Small movements in Revmote pitch, yaw and roll will be detected by gyros/accelerometers.

 

[Rodéric]

As Shifty Geezer said, I was under the impression that a collection of technologies/sensors would allow the revmote to have accurate position & rotation informations, rather than only one...

We may have details @ E3 (unlikely though) or when the console ships.
(People will open it to see what's in.)

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As Shifty Geezer said, I was under the impression that a collection of technologies/sensors would allow the revmote to have accurate position & rotation informations, rather than only one...

I thought there was some technical aspects announced somewhere or other to confirm this, hence my earlier request for info. Maybe it's just assumed after Nintendo acquired that MEMS tech, IIRC. Not much point in buying a company that develops gyros etc. if you're not going to use them

 

[Jabbah]

IMO there will be no positional sensing of the controllers, only gesture recognition, orientation and direction.

The main reason I dont think the position can be calculated is the shape of the sensor bar. It is a baton about 30cm in length (according to reports). Ignoring the fact that its difficult enough to position something accurately in a 2d plane from timings from just 2 sensors, these 2 sensors are going to be very close together. With the speed of light approaching 3x10^8m/s it is going to take just 1 nano second for a signal to travel along its length from one end of the sensor bar to the other. Now your also going to be standing face on to the sensor bar so a little bit of trig should help you to realise that even waving the controller about at arms length is only going to create small differences in distances from the ends of the sensor bar. We are talking timing differences in the sub 0.1 nano second range here! In other words far from trival.

My guess would be one of the controllers has accelerometers enabling hack and slash or baseball type actions, while the other has maybe gyroscopes to detect tilting and also some arrangement of IR LEDs on the front of the device that allow the sensor bar to detect where that section is pointing.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The main reason I dont think the position can be calculated is the shape of the sensor bar. It is a baton about 30cm in length (according to reports). Ignoring the fact that its difficult enough to position something accurately in a 2d plane from timings from just 2 sensors, these 2 sensors are going to be very close together. With the speed of light approaching 3x10^8m/s it is going to take just 1 nano second for a signal to travel along its length from one end of the sensor bar to the other. Now your also going to be standing face on to the sensor bar so a little bit of trig should help you to realise that even waving the controller about at arms length is only going to create small differences in distances from the ends of the sensor bar. We are talking timing differences in the sub 0.1 nano second range here! In other words far from trival.

That was my concern, that the speeds required would need incredible sensitivity. I didn't know if this had been solved cheaply though because you can get laser measurers that determine length via laser beam, which I guess is based on reflected light but I've really no idea. As a nanosecond is 1 billionth, if you had the sensor bar running at 1 GHz, the difference of a nanosecond would be detectable. Smaller variations are obviously going to go undetected, at lest through straight measurement, 3x10^8 ms is...30 cm in 1 ns, right? Which would be the sensitivity at 1GHz if I'm figuring this right, that the difference in distance from Revmote to left sensor versus Revmote to right sensor would have to be to register a 1ns delay. I don't know if there's any clever techniques though. Invariable there's some fantastic trick to get things to happen!