PS3 DUAL SHOCK 3 DETAILS EMERGE!

[Fox5]

Well, looks like I was a little confused...

If you aimed up and down in goldeneye, it would return to normal when you started moving. And if you did the manual aim(the R button) auto center was on, and this is true for any game I've ever played. I want a game where the cursor stays where I put it!

 

[Tagrineth]

Tag, mice don't have that much friction, or at least my optical mouse on a cloth pad doesn't. And I can't imagine how you can have shaky hands on a mouse but not on a joystick, I hate playing console fps because I can see my aim shaking while in manual aiming mode, and often just miss headshots because of it.

My wrists twitch when I'm trying to be precise. My thumbs don't.

Turok for N64 had no option to turn off lookspring. If you centered the stick the view centered as well. Obviously not ideal from a precision viewpoint, but the game didn't really suffer from it (many weapons had splash damage or benefitted from spraying fire every which way), and the player was often required to do fast up/down motions too, so it was actually a neccessary part of gameplay. With a bit of practice it worked fine (and there was a sensitivity slider too btw).

Hmm, so it doesn't. Heh. Spooky. I seem to remember having that option before... maybe when I was thinking about that game, I was thinking of Turok 2?

Goldeneye for N64 (DUH, lol) had no option to turn lookspring ON. While it worked fine, aiming was a lot slower in GE than in Turok. As the weapons were almost exclusively bullet-based and the game engine running at lower framerate, this was probably a good thing though. Still required a lot of re-adjustment switching between the two games.

I haven't played GE in at least four years... but I think its lookspring would activate if you moved, or something like that. I never really messed with that game's control options, anyway... and its focus on stealth and VERY wide auto-aim angle mean you probably don't need to move much with precise aim anyway

Metroid Prime (NOT for N64! ) has no option to turn off lookspring. Granted, the player needs to stand still to aim freely, but the way aiming works when panning around is definitely "springy" in nature.

Sure it does. Your aim won't recenter if you never release L. =)

If you aimed up and down in goldeneye, it would return to normal when you started moving. And if you did the manual aim(the R button) auto center was on, and this is true for any game I've ever played. I want a game where the cursor stays where I put it!

The manual aim is a bit weird in any of the games that use it. Even TimeSplitters 2 centers your view in that mode, when you have Lookspring set OFF. If it bothers you that much, nobody's forcing you to use the precision aim for anything except sniper rifles - and those don't have steady aim to begin with...

 

[Squeak]

The eyetoy software could be made to recognise the DS3, if it was a specific colour or had a reflective sticker on it, or something like that. But that would require the player to always hold the pad in a position, where it would be visible to the camera. That would not be very convenient or comfortable in the long run, I suspect.

I was more thinking to use DS3 for extra controls not necesserily something that would directly communicate with camera. Though if you actually did the special color thing it might open some interesting possibilities too.

You mean holding the pad in one hand, and the other in front of the eyetoy?
I don’t see that working very well, maybe with a N64 style pad (which was indeed designed for that sort of thing), but not with a side heavy DS3, with the sticks in that awkward position (if the rumours that they aren’t changing anything significantly are true).

Hand and gesture recognition should be possible on PS3, but would still be very demanding resource wise, taking a lot of power away from the main application.
And again, it would probably become very tiring waving you hands around all the time.

Not necessarily so demanding as it may look - besides you could vary just how much you want to do depending on the game (not just processing wise - obviously controlling schemes could be a lot more varied too).
And the whole point of gesture recognition as opposed to simple motion tracing (which current EyeToy does) is that you don't actually need to wave your hands around a lot - or widely.
Think in lines of a realistic&usable application of Minority Report interface, as opposed to the hollywood one(which had no usable purpose save making the 'operator' look cool).
As far as certain genres go - I see this as the means to probably ultimate controller scheme short of stuff like mind control

AI vision is very much still in its infancy. AFAIK things haven’t really progressed that much, since the first serious research, by people like David Marr in the 1960s and 70s.
So I would be very impressed seeing an inexpensive consumer device being the first to accurately track a finger over few pixels, in realtime.

Neither method would be very precise.
Mechanical controls are still more precise and you can set the speed/exchange ratio as you like.

Talking about shooting games - the "eyetoy" approach would have precision on the level of a lightgun, which in my experience easily matches speed/precision ratio of a mouse - and in effect greatly outmatches any joystick based controllers.

Unless the future eyetoy camera is motorised, and can detect and zoom in on the shape of a hand, it will have to do as the current one, and settle for one stationary view for all applications.
That means that it only has something like maybe 32x32 pixels to measure for example the movement of a finger. Hardly very precise?
You would have to swing your arms around in large sweeping movements, to cover the whole field of view, for it to be as accurate as a lightgun or mouse, which can be fun in small doses (like on the current eyetoy), but not for hours on end.