Old Discussion Thread for all 3 motion controllers

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The power of Wii Sports! :mrgreen:

I'd imagine Sony will use Move Play as their pack in / demo app. It's the only thing I've seen from Sony that approaches the level of instant intuitive control that made Wii Sports (and the Wii) so successful.

You only need to watch at that sports champions video from yesterday and see how important this is.
The average person walking through a shop is going to give up on something very quickly if it doesn't click right away. That's assuming they even bother to try it.

The Wii was a massive leap forward in breaking down interface abstractions, and it deserves all the success it's seen. If Microsoft play their cards right, Natal should be a similar leap forward because anyone who even walks past it should instantly understand it.
Sony don't have it quite so easy, but they can still do a good job if they pick the right software.
 
You mean Move Party ?

Unless there are visitors, my wife won't identify with it. OTOH, I can see her play WiiSports Resort every so often.

She thinks gaming is the greatest time waster on Earth (She plays casual Flash games though :rolleyes:). At least WSR reminds her to relax and exercise (She's too busy). The accurate Wiimote+ motion tracking also convinced her that this is a close substitute. She didn't bite when she played WiiSports last time, although she was clearly entertained.


About user experiences, yes, Sony does not have a polished newbie environment. XMB is pretty minimalist. Great for seasoned users, not so great for telling people what they should do first, what's most fun, most popular, etc.

I expect MS's in-store demo to have hands-on and also draw the crowd, sell itself via interesting concepts, use cases and tech demoes (like those subtle 30 minute informercials). Sony, as usual, will likely pull out their "We can do everything" video, briefly touch on everything and go, rewind and repeat. Ironically, if they take this approach, the users will most likely miss a large part of what PS3 can do ("Yeah, yeah" and move on).
 
That's pretty much my concern with Move Party (I actually wrote Wii Party the first time, but changed it to Move Play :mrgreen:).

Of everything they have shown, I believe it's clearly the most intuitive - and best shows the capabilities of the motion control system. But as you say it's a bit difficult to say who it would appeal to outside of a party environment.

She thinks gaming is the greatest time waster on Earth
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:(
It's sad, but it is a very commonly held view. Anything that can help show people what gaming can offer is a good thing. I honestly do believe the industry could be 5x bigger than it is.
 
Even Nintendo last year talked about how they think a significant portion of the population is in the 'Never' category. This isn't even 'Wii Sports' never, either.
 
The Shoot intro:
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2010/06/07/playstation-move-developer-diary-the-shoot-for-ps3/

The Shoot is a title exclusive to PlayStation Move, an arcade shooter where you are an action hero and the PlayStation Move motion controller is your gun. Listen to the director and shoot your way through five different spoofs of classic B-Movie themes: the Wild West, undersea monsters, haunted house, mobsters and a robot invasion. Shoot through parts of the highly destructible set to see what they’re really made of.
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@ 1:50, you can see PSEye track the player's position to avoid projectiles.
 
patsu said:
10 minutes of Move gameplay (by 2 eh... housewives ?)


The game looks like Sports Championship.
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/*puts on "enchanted hat of gaming culture defender" (+5 wisdom, +2 argumentation, -10 potency)*/

The problem I have with this and with Natal and with Wii games: why in hell do these games always have to look so shitty with respect to graphics. Animations are a joke, graphic fidelity is non existant in all shown clips so far - for me this just screams low quality product. If they really want to attract me with such stuff - put some "quality" in it: in graphics tech as well as in gamedesign tech and don't just rely on people behaving stupid in front of camera to suggest ultimate fun!!
 
The user selection screen of the Sports Challenge thing isn't very exciting yet, hopefully that improves a little. In the mean-time however, I'm impressed with the precision of the pointer - that seems pretty good.
 
patsu said:
IMHO, this MS technology is more interesting and useful than Natal:


Seems to complement Natal well.
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Controllers are muscle-machine interfaces. All they've achieved is to remove tactile feedback and reduce precision. This is a fool's errand.

The "always available" pitch also assumes that you don't need the muscles for anything else, which is ridiculous. The dude carrying his luggage clearly already needed his hand muscles, so how does the system tell he's currently controlling it or doing something else? Voice recognition? W/e it is, identify it, use it, and remove all the other cruft.
 
LightHeaven said:
For day use anywhere perhaps, but i don't see why that air guitar part wouldn't be achievable with natal.
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Depends on how complex you want Natal to recognize air guitar gestures I guess. If it's open palm and fist, it can do that. But if it's individual intricate finger movement 3-4 feet away, it may not be accurate.

Shifty Geezer said:
Hmmm, yes. A controllerless interface, and some electrodes trailing wires across the living room... :p
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They have a portable version.

Rolf N said:
The "always available" pitch also assumes that you don't need the muscles for anything else, which is ridiculous. The dude carrying his luggage clearly already needed his hand muscles, so how does the system tell he's currently controlling it or doing something else? Voice recognition? W/e it is, identify it, use it, and remove all the other cruft.
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Yeah need to calibrate. I'm more interested in this than Natal because it's not tied to a screen.


Also for voice recognition, I just remember that Natal doesn't really need that 4-mic array. Every 360 owner has a headset, I think it may be more accurate to use that headset since it's right beside the user's mouth (Just ignore the tagline "You're the controller" :p).
 
Also this Milo tech demo is interesting too:

The 2D recognition is "simply" edge recognition. But the idea of accumulating Milo's knowledge via a network is intriguing. They need to think of an app or game for it though.

Used to run a wallpaper site. Besides allowing the users to play a mini game with the wallpapers we all submitted, we were also interested to build a semantic network of wallpapers. Users were helping to tag and file wallpapers correctly (e.g., people may not know the name of the female model in the wallpaper).

We didn't complete the project. Built a bot with a web-based text dialog parser for folks to ask questions (like Eliza), and that's it. Instead of Milo, we called our bot Elaine. ^_^


The other way to do this is to do something like Playstation Home. That environment needs a persistent, collective user generated content-base or "hive mind". It's a time waster anyway, so going there to fool around with the bots and people (like MUSH) is not out of line.

We also hooked up a MUSH server behind the wallpaper site. People could walk in the MUSH Library (like a real book library) and see the most popular wallpapers as a prototype. We also got a bot to roam in the world (It's the same Elaine bot), but since we never complete the toy semantic network project, she's dumb. :)

EDIT: That's why I like the idea behind Playstation Home/MUSH. You can integrate a lot of interesting things in a virtual world. It doesn't have to be 3D. A text-based or 2D interface will work just as well (or better !). Then you can let people venture into the 3D world to look for and play with the bot he/she's been talking to.
 
http://www.vg247.com/2010/06/03/miyamoto-ms-and-sony-motion-devices-are-threatening/

Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto’s told Edge that Microsoft and Sony’s rush to motion with Natal and Move is “threatening” behaviour.

“Whenever something we have created and presented is followed by copies, we always feel it is threatening,” said the dev legend.

“More than that, we’re concerned that others are trying to do something similar for the sake of it. It’s not encouraging to Nintendo.”
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IMHO, it's more worrisome to see Nintendo think that MS and Sony are simply copying them. [size=-2]Better bring out your big guns ![/size]

OTOH, he uses the word "rush", so may be Ninty is also concerned that quality will be compromised ? (consumers may get fed up by rush jobs).
 
patsu said:
Also this Milo tech demo is interesting too:
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For some reason I feel that the 3D depth detection could be redundant for something like Milo and anything equipped with a camera and microphone can do that with the right software
 
Nesh said:
For some reason I feel that the 3D depth detection could be redundant for something like Milo and anything equipped with a camera and microphone can do that with the right software
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Hence, this is why Natal is not just hardware but critically also, software, which is where MSFT strength lie.
 
According to Peter Molyneux, they are trying to make 3D object recognition work (by having users "teach" Natal collectively).

The depth perception may be useful to get a sense of the surrounding (e.g., scanning your living room for known/learned items).

We'll see how well it turns out. Other than the out-of-the-box items, the learning could take a while to be accurate.

But yes, you may be able to do some/most of the object recognition via 2D image analysis (and sound). Proper lighting may be needed for accurate color perception though.

EDIT: I remember some universities/labs were developing a semantic network of general knowledge for a virtual human. Perhaps their databases can be used here. ^_^
 
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