Old Discussion Thread for all 3 motion controllers

I know games were pulled. They are normally slick but individual pr is regularly rotten.

 

The blog post doesn't say one way of the other. I'm basing my inference on the fact that it would severely limit functionality if the game only had access to the skeletal portion of the data. It makes more sense, if you're committed to this in the first place, to do that processing on the host. The processor in the camera device should have its hands full with the triangulation process anyway.

 

Client based.

 

I don´t get this budget, you add the base price of the unit? That´s like me adding a everything the PS3 can to the XBOX and Wii prices.

XBOX+BluRay Player+ 200$ of Live Gold + Natal

If we use your logic no one will ever pick anything but the Wii for motion controlled games.

 

Weird ! Don't you think those kind of preference data is valuable for marketers ? especially for a free network operator like PSN to upsell stuff ?

EDIT: Okay, I'll keep quiet on this item now.

 

Sony's waggle is waggle done right. It will have its uses, and it will provide for relatively easy cross-porting of casual titles.

Natal is something entirely else, with its new set of problems and solutions. Until it is out, there's no way to tell how well it will work - although the chatter coming through private channels is very encouraging.

WRT precision - it's a time-of-flight camera, which means they emit a IR light ray and measure the time for it to return; they probably scan the room with the ray, and they can control it at will; one of the materials said they scan the entire scene in 5 frames; if they want to detect only hands, for example, they can focus mostly on the area around where the hands were last frame, but receive increased precision in return.

It can augment normal controllers very well, unlike the waggles. E.g. you play a team-based shooter with the dualstick controller, you tell your teammates "regroup over there" over voice comm, and point at the screen for a second with your hand; your teammate sees a flashing light marker in the game world. You can activate star power by throwing the horns or headbanging. You can cast a few predefined spells with several simple gestures etc.

 

Ha ha, Cool ! With new investment in the camera, I thought precision should be one of its strength. So finger tracking is possible (e.g., pressing guitar chords) ? How's its speed ?

At the moment, I don't like their (sales) pitch in coarse grain, full body detection (At that granularity, PS Eye should be able to approximate the solution too).

 

Exactly.

Unless you give someone a reason to spend more, they won't.

People that are interested in games as they are, have a xb360 or ps3.

People that are interested in wii sports, have a wii.

If you want to lure wii gamers, give them a reason.

If you want to lure those that don't have a wii or xb360 or ps3, give them a reason.

Sony has essentially pitted themselves directly in competition with Wii with their tech. But their price puts them outside of that market of nongamers that may be interested.

 

Personally I'd doubt that. It don't think it's anything that fancy. I'd guess it's just a low resolution IR sensor that's gating pulses from one or more IR transmitters (essentially very similar to active autofocus on many still cameras) to essentially generate a z-buffer that gets sent to the host along with the webcam's own buffer. From there the host CPU processes the image data, so you're right in pointing out that most of the computer vision processing is occurring on the host CPU. Doesn't make sense to implement that on the camera devices itself as that just increases the cost of the device and potentially limits flexibility.

In that regard the PS Eye is similar in which it doesn't even do image processing in-camera (like the EyeToy did), instead just dumping raw sensor data to the host CPU to process (Cell has far more resources to play with than some small, cheap DSP on a camera). That gives you a lot more flexibility to perform different types of analysis on the data, rather than just trying to work within the constraints of a 2D processed RGB image.

Personally, I'm a fan of ultrasonic sensing myself. I used to mess around with that quite a bit in the past using old Polaroid focusing sensors.

EDIT: Looks like Assen beat me to it...

 

If, and please pay attention to the "if", they have really solved the century old problem on consoles with FPS games, namely hitting what you aim at, then i am happy

 

.... but how fast and how fine can Cell process the raw image data compared to:
* A simplified dataset due to the supporting IR data, and
* The IR sensor's ability to zoom into specific area to gather more detailed data

Essentially, can PSEye track fine finger movement fast enough ? I doubt it has enough resolution to do so at some distance away. Not sure if the 3DV camera can do so too.



As for the ultrasonic controller, how small can they make the emitter ? And how power hungry are those ? Someone suggested a (finger) ring-based device, but I suspect it'd be too small. Perhaps a glove is possible ? If it can be fitted on a ring, I'd rather fit it to a ribbon/sticker so that I can tie/attach it anywhere I want.

 

I've seen transducers as small as a pencil eraser and they're usually around a couple of dollars. But you're thinking about them backwards. Transducers that cheap generally don't have the range/resolution that would be practical in this sort of application. Also sticking this stuff all over yourself is kinda silly since it's only really useful for measuring distance. I was thinking more along the lines of ultrasonic imaging from the perspective of the camera, not doing range-finding from a device on the user.

Well for starters you don't have an ability to "zoom" a sensor. If you're picking out a portion of a scene, then you're just interpolating a section of data from your sensor. Secondly, you're forgetting that the PS Eye can also see into the IR spectrum as well (quite well actually). As far as Cell processing image data, are you serious?

If Natal is working with the same specs as the 3DV camera, then it's actually lower resolution than the PS Eye. The big disadvantage is that you don't have an active IR emitter, so you're stuck working with passive light gathering; so open your windows or go play outside where there's more infrared light!

 

Oh wow, you actually replied to my post. I should have bought lottery tickets today.

I thought the PS Eye has pretty low resolution. Will the interpolated data be useful ? I mean my fingers may appear rather small when viewed on TV (from PS Eye's perspective).

As for Cell processing image data.... yeah it's fast; but there could be a ton of data coming in for fast movement. Not to mention the SPUs will need to run the actual game. I have always wondered how heavy is PS Eye taxing the Cell. Would you be able to shed some light ?

 

I'm thinking they must have upgrade to HD resolution cameras for the Natal.

 

Me also thinks that (for the RGB camera). The benfit of having all the data processing local in the camera is that the video stream can be lossy compressed before being sent to the console cpu. IIRC correctly the USB was a limiting factor to the resolution of the PS eye.

If you remember the original spec of the PS3 (which never materialzed) it contained another Gbit ethernet port which was said to be there for peripherals demanding high speed connections such as HD cameras.

When the PSEye was released there were rumours that there had been an internal fight within Sony wether to releas a HD camera or the current PSEye, but the cheapest solution won. In the light of the slow sales of the PS3 due to the high price point, that was probably a very easy decision, Ken Kutaragi left during the same time frame.

Still I hope there will be a HD-Eye (with PS-Eye compatibility) somewhere down the road when the sensor has come down in prce. Incorporating a Gbit hub in the camera should be pretty cheap if they wanted to do that and they could probably find a clever and neat cabling solution where the second ethernet connector would be kept close to the one connected to the PS3.

 

I agree with this. Sony's system is more (and probably better) geared towards games. Microsoft's is intended to change the way one interfaces with consumer electronics: browsing through menus, playing video's or playing simple games. It is intended to enable those to who are alienated by even the simplest controller to be able to use such machines (and hence become a customer).

Software is Micosoft's strong suit, I'm confident they will be able to support it and create a very intuitive way of interacting with the 360. Also, one should not forget that Microsoft spends incredible amounts of money on generic research every year. Maybe those billions per year will finally pay off when they are combined in Project Natal (remember that Molyneux also points this out, when they browsed through the MS SDK's for voice recognition etc).

 

Really?, so then how come Wii Sports Resort can do 1:1 fine?

 

Wii Sports has much simpler graphics.

 

Looking at the video again, the sword is 1:1 in Red Steel 2 before the player slashes with it and its not as if the graphics change when you slash at someone. Personally I think it probably just comes down to how the developers wanted the sword play to work.

If you look at Wii Sports Resort having the sword totally 1:1 ends up looking quite clumbsy at times due to most people not really being very good with swords Maybe they just wanted to make sure the sword fighting looked good by giving the player full control of where to hit but using an animation for the actual slash.

I'm sure IGN will ask this question when they do their Red Steel 2 interview so no doubt we'll find out then.

 

The pre-recorded Mylo video - as she looked into the water, there was a significant (easily noticable) lag between her hand movements and the hand movements of her reflection. That's where I noticed it most, anyway.

Actually, I think the opposite is true. My original reaction to the PSMC was that I could play Tiger Woods and Pro Evo with the great Wii motion controls and with the benefits of PS3 (graphics, online etc). It would be pretty simple for developers to port control systems from Wii to PS3 in these games, as an option alongside current PS3 control systems. Which of course means sizable and cost-effective support for PSMC from third parties.