Old Discussion Thread for all 3 motion controllers

[patsu]

I assume they apply creative control over the avatar. It is still tracking the player's basic movement (The kid changed his speed at different points in the video). Didn't they cut down the number of control points ? If so, the artist may have added some basic animation to cover the missing points. Best is to wait for bigger (and more !) videos.

e.g., The body flailing demo may eventually turn out to be a different kind of social games. It may be more interesting to share people's dance moves, than achieving the scores (i.e., personal expression vs sports).

 

[zed]

So hands up how still thinks natal will be able to track individual finger movements?

 

[patsu]

You don't have to track individual fingers for most hand gestures. You also don't have to track the entire body's skeleton and position if you're only interested in hand gestures. It can be a separate/different algorithm altogether.

 

[Crossbar]

So hands up how still thinks natal will be able to track individual finger movements?

...hesitates...puts one finger up in the air.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

...hesitates...puts one finger up in the air.

Sorry but we lack the resolution to register your vote...

 

[ShadowRunner]

Are we talking about the same thing here? My point isn't the lag, but the way limbs don't follow the player. Lag you can live with, but if you go to hit a ball and find your avatar's arm isn't there hitting as you request, it'll be annoying! These is a very different problem to lag. Similar to EyeToy's lack of motion detection in low-contrast conditions. You can compensate 200ms of lag to move your arm in advance to his a ball, but if the motion doesn't register the lag is the least of your worries.

I think arms should be fine, id guess they are a hell of a lot easier to track than legs because they have much more seperation. If you locate the head and from there the torso it should be very easy to tell the arms appart even to the point of treating them as thier own seperate entities, much harder with legs because of there proximity to eachother and thier close points of origin. It is supprising that hey havent programmed it so that if the software isnt sure with sum degree of certainty where the legs are then it just defaults to a natural pose until it can pick them up again, its very unlikely the user will be tying themselves in impossible notts lol.

If the upper body traking works consistantly i think natal can still manage many game ideas, legs are much less important IMO. It would be a shame thou because the lower body tracking is unique to natal, there competitors have shown responsive upper body tracking to the point many natal experiences could be ported in some fashion losing some of its uniqueness.

How much any of this matters for an initial purchase is debatable though. I think where it could be an issue is if it becmes frustrating enough that people are not much interested in buying future titles beyond thier initial purchase. Somewhat like the Eyetoy situation in a way.

 

[zed]

Sorry but we lack the resolution to register your vote...

oh witty, ppl were talking about doing guitar player like stuff with natal, I mean comeon!

A solution which I have mentioned before is for natal to come bundled with some (reflective/brightly colored/emitting) bands that the person sticks around their ankles, wrists, this should greatly help its tracking capabilities.

 

[patsu]

I mentioned guitar playing before. The issue with that is knowing when and how the fingers interact with a (air) guitar. It's one more step away from detecting individual finger movement.

That's also when I realized buttons/trigger is important. T_T

 

[patsu]

PS Move on BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8649540.stm

Interview with Anton Mikhailov:
http://www.gamexplain.com/article-7...lained-an-interview-with-anton-mikhailov.html

Ok, well that should resolve that issue, at least. I had also heard some discussion that since the EyeToy is only 120 Hz and the Wiimote camera is 12 MHz, that PlayStation Move might not be best suited for picking up the quick motions that you might see in a game like Red Steel, for example.

Cameras aren’t the only things that allow us to do fast motion. The accelerometers and gyros are very important for this as well. Our sensors actually run faster than the camera so that in the event it does miss a motion they can compensate. Since this happens quickly there are no drift issues that you see when you use accelerometers and gyros only.

On the Dualshock 3, the motion tracking was up to about 300 degrees per second while on Move, it’s around 2500. It’s really hard to move faster than that without hurting yourself.

There are also some advancements in our tech. Not all MEMS tech is made the same. They're just chips, and ours have quite a bit of improvement. This means that we can track fast motions as well as slow ones. It’s actually not easy to do both at the same time.


I think at this point, it’d be worth it to go into some of the differences between the Move and it’s most primary competitor, the Wiimote. For the sake of this discussion, when I refer to the Wiimote, I am including Wii MotionPlus as if it were a built-in part of the device.

Really, PlayStation Move and the Wii Remote are fundamentally different devices. The Wii Remote is a relative device, meaning it can tell how far you're going, but not where you end up. This might be a bit confusing because people think “how can I know where I’m going but not where I am?”. Well imagine that you had to walk next door, but with your eyes closed. You might fumble around and roughly know where you’re going but wouldn’t have any clue where you are exactly. The PlayStation Eye is like our eyes -- it lets us really know where we are not just which way we’re headed. With Move, we use the camera for absolute position, and the sensors for absolute angle.

Much better than Peter Dille's precision talk. But still not understandable by the masses.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'm surprised he didn't point out the interviewers source of info is utter nonsense. A 12 million FPS camera?! As written it sounds like the Wiimote camera is running at 12 MHz and I'm sure plenty will be mislead once they've read it.

 

[goonergaz]

I tried Voice Control on iPhone this morning and turned it off. Speech recognition is not reliable, but there are some situations where it's applicable (because our hands are tied up). I think the problem with speech recognition is it adds an additional control layer rather than removing it, making the experience cumbersome.

Indeed, and when you think how long voice recognition has been around and the fact it still has not been fully realised makes me think even more that the initial Natal promises are at least a generation away.

 

[dragonelite]

Has this been posted yet sounds like natal
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/omek-interactive-project-natal/

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Interesting parallel development, which is unsurprising given the development of 3D cameras in Israel. The first vid is kinda useless. The second YouTube one shows lag similar to Natal. You can also see on the silhouette errors in the camera's depth perception. I wonder if Natal has this too? If they're not using time-of-flight, then I suppose occlusion could come into it. The boxing was guesture based, not 1:1. So really, absolutely nothing we haven't seen already! Other than the work of only 2 people apparently.

 

[Arwin]

I'm surprised he didn't point out the interviewers source of info is utter nonsense. A 12 million FPS camera?! As written it sounds like the Wiimote camera is running at 12 MHz and I'm sure plenty will be mislead once they've read it.

I thought for a moment that this could actually be right, because the wii remote just tracks two sets of LED lights and those probably have a frequency at this rate, but then of course the PS Eye does the exact same thing. So I've been looking on the web and found that the Wii remote contains a 100Hz IR camera made by Pixart (http://www.pixart.com.tw/), with a sensor capable of only 128x96, which is then interpolated 8x to a resolution of 1024x768.

As we all know the PS Eye can do 320x240 at 120, which seems almost exactly right to match HD resolutions if a similar interpolation technique is used. Presumably the software running on SPE should be able to at least match the chips in the WiiMote, and I also assume that the size of the bulb on the Sony Move controller allows for more precision as well.

Patsu's link to the interview with Anton is interesting also, particularly this comment:

On the Dualshock 3, the motion tracking was up to about 300 degrees per second while on Move, it’s around 2500. It’s really hard to move faster than that without hurting yourself.

There are also some advancements in our tech. Not all MEMS tech is made the same. They're just chips, and ours have quite a bit of improvement. This means that we can track fast motions as well as slow ones. It’s actually not easy to do both at the same time.

This wouldn't have meant much to me if I hadn't read one of those excellent 'Iwata asks' articles on the WiiMotion+ add-on. It explains among others why the point about detecting slow and fast motions are not so easy to do both at the same time:

http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/wiimotionplus/vol1_page2.jsp
So the gyro in the Wii runs in two different modes - one for up to 10km/h and one for movements up to 100km/h. They also discuss how they support up to 1600 degrees per second in the gyro (allows for a comparison with the figure above, they also mention that 300 is the default for instance for video cameras).

Another interesting point is the impact they experienced of temperature change and how they eventually ended up tackling that issue.

 

[Prophecy2k]

I'm surprised he didn't point out the interviewers source of info is utter nonsense. A 12 million FPS camera?! As written it sounds like the Wiimote camera is running at 12 MHz and I'm sure plenty will be mislead once they've read it.

If the PSEye is 120MHz and the WiiMote 12MHz... doesn't that make the PSEye faster?

Even if the "M" part is wrong and it's 120fps vs. 12fps... surely PSEye is tracking more frames per second right?!?! :-s

 

[goonergaz]

As we all know the PS Eye can do 320x240 at 120, which seems almost exactly right to match HD resolutions if a similar interpolation technique is used.

Just a wild thought here...Sony said the PS3 camera would be HD, I wonder if during some point in priot to release it was decided to drop the HD resolution so the PSeye could be used for the Move?

 

[patsu]

I don't know what in Wii is running at 12MHz but Arwin is correct.

The numbers I read from elsewhere are also:
Wii IR camera is 100Hz @ 1024x768 (interpolated).
PSEye is 60Hz @ 640x480 or 120Hz @ 320x240.


I believe the 2500 degree/second figure has been mentioned before. The new info here is the PS Move MEMS can handle slow speed as well as high speed movement (at the same time ?).

 

[_phil_]

Interpolated from 128x96.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If the PSEye is 120MHz and the WiiMote 12MHz... doesn't that make the PSEye faster?

Even if the "M" part is wrong and it's 120fps vs. 12fps... surely PSEye is tracking more frames per second right?!?! :-s

Best guess, one was a framerate measure and the other an internal chip clockspeed. The actual video feed rates are 120 vs 100. Or 60 vs 100 if the improved resolution is worth anything to Move. I'm surprised Wii is only 128x96, but on reflection two adjacent intensities should give a pretty exact position. That is, if the LED is between two pixels, those two CCD points will be lit to different intensities relative to which pixel the LED is nearest to. Thus resolution probably isn't too important and PSEye will work at 120 fps.

 

[obonicus]

Maybe 60fps for augmented reality minigames?