Old Discussion Thread for all 3 motion controllers

[tha_con]

I still feel as though Natal is just too "concept" right now. All of their tech demo's were extremely limited (simply tracking body movements and sweeping motions, not much outside of what the PS Eye could do for motion tracking).

The Paint and Dodgeball were probably the worst things they could have shown me, as a consumer, because it displayed little accuracy (or at least how little was required).

I also don't know how well menu browsing will be from other areas. What if there are multiple options on screen, is there going to be a pointer to match my hand? What if there are multiple players, how will it handle that? There seems to be a lot of ground work that wasn't shown.

I think the system has a lot of potential, but I think it also has a long way to go before it turns into something that can make 'waves' in the gaming industry.


I think Sony's solution could do well for them, but they will have to take the appropriate approach to it. If they want it to be successful, then they will absolutely have to bundle it with each and every PS3 that is sold on the market when it comes out. It will not succeed if it is left as another "PSEye" or "Eyetoy". It just won't stand a chance. Same goes for Natal.

 

[Crossbar]

Here's what I would like to know... what specifically could be done in Natal that could not be done with the PSEye? Hardware wise, do we really know for sure that this thing is that different? Seems like Microsoft claims the magic is in the software, specs for the camera don't seem to be known? Also, looking at EyePet wow PSEye still has a few tricks! In fact, I found that trailer more impressive than anything for Natal so far.

I think it´s pretty clever done how they establish the surface where the Eyepet can play around. The user smacks his hand in the floor (or table or whatever), the camera registers where the hand stops and the microphone registers the sound and the PS3 calculates the distance to the hand. Voila you´ve established a 3d space to work with.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Here's a similar Augmented Reality application on PSP
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1300185

You have to find creatures around the home, and catch them by interacting. Then battle with other players. It's a good showcase of what camera tech can do (using a capture card for reference).

 

[patsu]

Interesingly Eurogamer think that MS could enter the market first

I suspect MS will release in fall 2009 also, using the less ambitious 3DV technology if necessarily to claim some market share early.

Still... Sony and Nintendo are already in the market with a working motion sensing product (one with full body motion sensing, the other one owns the space). So MS will enter the market last. They may help to popularize it further though !

I also think that both Sony and Nintendo could change outdoor (duh... portable) gaming. They both have portable devices in the market. The ultrasonic controller, PS2 level camera only solution, and even the Vitality sensor sound suspicously portable -- if done right. I have always hated the PSP screen under bright sunlight. Perhaps some other games can be invented for picnics and camping trips.

 

[thatdude90210]

Interesingly Eurogamer think that MS could enter the market first

That might not be surprising. While MS has given many journalists chances to try out Natal hands on, Sony hasn't done the same (no reports that I've seen). Could be it's not as user friendly yet, or that the theory that it was a last minute response to Natal holds some water.

 

[liolio]

I suspect MS will release in fall 2009 also, using the less ambitious 3DV technology if necessarily to claim some market share early.

Still... Sony and Nintendo are already in the market with a working motion sensing product (one with full body motion sensing, the other one owns the space). So MS will enter the market last. They may help to popularize it further though !

I also think that both Sony and Nintendo could change outdoor (duh... portable) gaming. They both have portable devices in the market. The ultrasonic controller, PS2 level camera only solution, and even the Vitality sensor sound suspicously portable -- if done right. I have always hated the PSP screen under bright sunlight. Perhaps some other games can be invented for picnics and camping trips.

I don't believe so. I would put my bet on the second half of 2010 (actually end Q3 early Q4 would be my favored option).
Eye pet won't make PSeye a thread to Nintendo or MS shares anytime soon, it's been here for a while actually. For Sony motion sensing tech MS (via Shane Kim) simply doesn't believe Sony will manage to pull this out by spring 2010.
Clearly the most likely thing to happen is both product launching head to head.

 

[patsu]

I don't believe so. I would put my bet on the second half of 2010 (actually end Q3 early Q4 would be my favored option).
Eye pet won't make PSeye a thread to Nintendo or MS shares anytime soon, it's been here for a while actually. For Sony motion sensing tech MS (via Shane Kim) simply doesn't believe Sony will manage to pull this out by spring 2010.
Clearly the most likely thing to happen is both product launching head to head.

It's just a convenient way to drum up buzz -- if they want to. They have the tech anyway. Many of the demoed applications can be done with a 3DV/PS Eye solution (depending on how hard it is to port to and maintain on 360).

Not sure if Sony will drum up PS Eye or any other motion sensing application via firmware update.

 

[one]

Interesingly Eurogamer think that MS could enter the market first

In this E3 2009 interview, Hirai says the target launch date of the new motion controller for PS3 is Spring 2010. He thinks accuracy is already there in the hardware side, but it needs good software too.

http://av.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/rt/20090604_212396.html

 

[Naboomagnoli]

It's just a convenient way to drum up buzz -- if they want to. They have the tech anyway. Many of the demoed applications can be done with a 3DV/PS Eye solution (depending on how hard it is to port to and maintain on 360).

Not sure if Sony will drum up PS Eye or any other motion sensing application via firmware update.

Most of the demoed applications, the ones that are genuine and not staged, are rather primitive compared to the grand concept of Milo, which is miles (arf) away from being anything like the trailer. Talking to a boy who just nods blankly or swinging your arms around like Godzilla would be rather underwhelming compared to the H.A.L-esque concept trailer.

That's the thing about these date estimations - Natal made its concept clear and have sounded out developers, but the technology itself isn't ready and properly working yet; the PS3motes are clearly ready to roll, but just need some Wii games made multi-plat or some decent PSN games to get the ball rolling.

 

[Scott_Arm]

The thing about both of these, is it doesn't matter how finished the hardware is as much as the software. Unless there is a compelling software package (Punch your boss in the face) ready at launch, and some others immediately on the horizon, I don't think there will be much interest.

My point is that even with the hardware were 100% finished right now, you wouldn't see quick release because software takes time and neither demonstrated anything close to a finished software package that could be bundled.

 

[patsu]

Unless there is a compelling software package (Punch your boss in the face)

In Japan, it'd be "Flip a girl's skirt with wind generated by bare hands" (TM).


... which reminds me. After the LBP Internet publishing integration, Sony should use LittleBigPlanet to allow users to create PS Eye application. Let me build the above apps (Everyone will have their own favorites). It already allows me to capture PS Eye video in-game, now keep the channel open and add interactive video elements to it.

For crying out loud, they should do something about Home and PS Eye too. These two apps are supposed to be the user-generated content flag ships.

 

[liolio]

In this E3 2009 interview, Hirai says the target launch date of the new motion controller for PS3 is Spring 2010. He thinks accuracy is already there in the hardware side, but it needs good software too.

http://av.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/rt/20090604_212396.html

Say stated the same during the conference, neither eurogamer neither Ms think to believe them that's it.

 

[obonicus]

Say stated the same during the conference, neither eurogamer neither Ms think to believe them that's it.

Eurogamer suffers from the same problem all gaming journalists do: they don't know anything. I'm slightly suspicious that this will, indeed, be delayed until they have a software lineup, but as joker454 pointed out he already knows people who have been toying with the prototype. And certainly it's not in MS' best interest to say anything positive about their competitors.

 

[Tap In]

IGN Milo hands on

... snip... And with that we were out of time. But at the very least, Molyneux proved that the demo shown in the Microsoft press conference video wasn't completely canned. Though none of us got to see the picture-scanning segment or the aforementioned fish-skipping moments from Monday, Milo did react to most of what we did in a believable way when we did it "properly."

Obviously, there's still a long ways to go before Milo graduates out of the "Uber Seaman" that he is now, and I'm also curious to know what level of influence a nearby Lionhead rep had directly over the demo itself -- as attached to the Xbox 360 running Milo, was a laptop with a read-out/ eyes-on view of people using the camera. It was never really clarified what the nearby Lionhead rep was doing to and with the Laptop and the information being sent to it, by the game -- outside of verifying new people entering the camera range and initializing some of the various moments in the demo.

Even so, the potential for this game and how you could ultimately interact with the character is very high, and I'm excited to see where it goes next.

Oh, and one other bit of info before I go -- when asked what sort of game Milo will eventually be once it's out of the testing/demo phase, he said: "Two Words: Super Tamagochi."

IGN Natal hands on

...snip... All in all, I found Project Natal to be quite refreshing. It's nowhere near the gimmicky device I originally took it for and the fact that it works already on a retail Xbox 360 (Burnout was running on an "out of the store" model, no debugs or special systems required) says a lot about its current stage of development.

To say that I'm anxious to see where Microsoft, and it's horde of third party developers, takes his next is an understatement.

 

[Naboomagnoli]

Something that has been dug up elsewhere..
Head tracking without IR glasses

And according to Joystiq the Eyepet trailer consists of genuine gameplay, and is not pre-rendered (as I had assumed given the quality of animation).

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/04/impressions-eyepet-ps3/

 

[bkilian]

The axis of the wand (not XYZ!), along the length of the wand in a linear ray. As a laser beam from a laser pointer.

There's a calibration tool in the Wii menus. This sets up the triangulation so the screen is mapped to motion. You can point on the screen keeping the XY position of the Wiimote static and rotating it on a point. You can rotate to point at any part of the screen and have the Wiimote cursor land pretty much there. It's sensitive enough that it picks up the wobble of the hand! Although range isn't great. You have to be close enough to the TV/sensor bar otherwise it jitters like crazy or loses input competely. Triangulation isn't truly pixel-accurate or screen-aware, but it's as good an approximation as we can hope to get, and is very effective, just as GPS has no idea what the Earth looks like, but can locate where you are on it to a very small fraction of the Earth's area.

Okay, yeah, you can do pointing like that, moving your arm more like mouse, as EyeToy does it. Natal will be fine for interfaces. I was talking about a pointing device as a handgun though. For playing a shooter where you hold the gun, like a lightgun, it needs something extra (I assume). And likewise baseball/tennis, I think. In golf, the rotation of the club may be inferred from arm positions if you hold it right. I admit I'm guessing at this point looking at the tech and demos and seeing what wasn't shown. I would love to be proved wrong. A single camera system that can do the whole Wii thing would be perfectly elegant.

Regards lag, EyeToy had a consderable lag. I'd expect a couple of frames minimum with any imaging based device, though if the camera is faster than the screen refresh (PSEye's 120 Hz mode) that may be less.

Aah, the amazing human brain. What you're seeing is the effect of a positive feedback loop. You move your hand, the pointer moves on the screen, your brain translates that into how you moved your hand, and then sends the signal to your hand about how to move it some more to reach the point you want to reach. You _think_ the ray from the controller is pointing to a specific point on the screen, but it doesn't have to even be close.

You have the same thing using a mouse. We "instinctively" are able to position a mouse with pinpoint accuracy on the screen, but the pointer on the screen and the position of the mouse are not that closely bound.

I strapped a laser pointer onto the side of my Wii remote yesterday and tried it. The laser pointer dot and the dot on the screen had almost no relation to each other. If I placed the laser pointer dot on the place on the screen I wanted it pointed to, the screen pointer was nowhere to be seen.

 

[thatdude90210]

I strapped a laser pointer onto the side of my Wii remote yesterday and tried it. The laser pointer dot and the dot on the screen had almost no relation to each other. If I placed the laser pointer dot on the place on the screen I wanted it pointed to, the screen pointer was nowhere to be seen.

In the game Ghost Squad for the Wii, there's calibration screen that takes just the upper left corner and the lower right corner to calibrate. If I have the sensor bar in just the right position, for me that's the upper middle of the TV, it's surprisingly accurate. I can pretty much shoot by just aiming like a real gun while using the "Nyko perfect shot" without using a screen cursor. Edit: oh, and have to stand in the right position.

 

[bkilian]

I still feel as though Natal is just too "concept" right now. All of their tech demo's were extremely limited (simply tracking body movements and sweeping motions, not much outside of what the PS Eye could do for motion tracking).

The Paint and Dodgeball were probably the worst things they could have shown me, as a consumer, because it displayed little accuracy (or at least how little was required).

I agree, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. They could have done both demos using the existing XBox Live Vision Camera. I was hoping that at the end of the "lets use huge motions to slop paint around" demo he actually just signed his name onto the canvas by drawing in the air, but it didn't happen. It would have been an awesome ending to the demo though.

I suspect MS will release in fall 2009 also, using the less ambitious 3DV technology if necessarily to claim some market share early.

Still... Sony and Nintendo are already in the market with a working motion sensing product (one with full body motion sensing, the other one owns the space). So MS will enter the market last. They may help to popularize it further though !

Uhh, the live vision camera has a number of games that use motion sensing as a control. So MS is in essentially the same position as Sony currently. Unfortunately, without studio like lighting (I'd like to see a living room as well lit as the one in the EyePet video) they both are pretty crap. Mine always has issues telling me apart from the background.

 

[Naboomagnoli]

Eyepet is played in the second half of the vid here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8083046.stm

 

[_phil_]

PSeye has low light sensitivity , high refresh rate (120hz) and 4 mics.It's much a better cam than Live vision.