Topic: PS3's Wand...Does Nintendo Have Anything To Fear?

Expand

@clicketyclick

No, what's awkward and unnatural is moving your elbow up and down, changing the position of the back end of the controller rather than moving your wrist, changing the position of the tip of the controller, in order to change where it's pointing.

You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding on this point. It's natural for pointing if it actually registers exactly what the tip of the object you are holding can see, not merely where you're moving it. If you've ever held a laserpointer, gun-like device, etc, you'll have no problem with aiming using the Wii remote, as it works exactly as any elongated pointing device would work, without any complication involved. It does indeed take just a quick movement of the wrist, or you can move your arm at different angles based on the situation, or even hold it sideways and see your character doing the same thing. The Wand is a bit more limited in this area since it doesn't know exactly what the tip is seeing, and needs to use basic motion sensors inside the device to supplement basic information about position with information about rotation, tilt, etc. Put it this way: where pointing is concerned, the Wii remote is indeed 1:1 as far capturing your movements precisely without needing additional calculations or estimates. The Wand isn't. If you watch the videos closely, it's clear that the angle of the wand is being added on by various calculations from its internal sensors, and isn't as smooth at times as its positioning within the room.

Now, as for 1:1 motion regarding other functionality, it's largely a mythical ideal to begin with, as it ends up not being particularly useful to developers. There are very few scenarios in which a perfect 1:1 correlation between yourself and the game is desirable; read statements from any developer who worked on a Motion Plus game, and see why they all end up deciding to use gestures instead (albeit measured more precisely now with M+), because that's more fun and gives you more possibilities. Perfect 1:1 easily leads to flailing around, except in certain contexts, and no one is going to be able to put together a package as instantly enjoyable and understandable in this arena than Wii Sports Resort, if we're talking about general market penetration. Developers are more important than the hardware (even as imprecise as the Wiimote's pure motion sensing was at first, Wii Sports rightly dazzled the world like only a handful of tech products in history), and Sony doesn't have its selling point yet, just tech demos.

To the people who think Sony is only just now copying Nintendo after seeing the success of the Wii, you should know they filed a patent on their motion controller back in 2004. It was originally meant for the PS2. Nintendo was just faster off the mark in revealing their motion controller because their technology was greatly inferior.

Honestly, you'd have to be blind not to see how Sony and Microsoft are both playing catch-up with Nintendo on this one. Only in one's wildest dreams could the spectacle of this last E3 (ie. both Sony and Microsoft trying to out-motion one another) be seen as anything but the direct result of Nintedo's market domination via its new strategy. Of course both of them had generic patents regarding controllers based on camera detection -- that's never been a new technical concept, and has been used in various ways for capturing motion for character models even for ages, but it's something that both of them vastly underestimated as a way of bringing gaming to a wider populace, and that they took a pass on for their new systems. Now that they've been shown up by a system with far less power and on-paper features, they're following Nintendo's lead once again, but trying to one-up them of course, because if you're years late to the party, you'd sure as hell better have improved tech to show for it.

Sony just tacks on as many new features as possible without any coherent strategy or vision for their device. It's embarrassing from a marketing perspective, and it will never work, much like the iPod versus the Zune. The Zune added more technical features and sat back expectantly, proudly holding its list of technical specs and their superiority to the iPod. But it didn't even come close in sales, because tech specs alone are only one part of the design of a product, and Apple beat them out in every possible way regarding interface, simplicity, and being targeted precisely to its function. The PS3 can easily have a million features tacked on, and I have no question regarding Sony's resources for shoving in more tech (and subsidizing it from other divisions, but that's another story), but you won't see it reach the general populace the way the Wii did, because it's just a mixup of features with no coherence. The Wii was a bold statement for the future of Nintendo's gaming, and they threw everything behind that vision, so that it was a complete package that millions instantly connected with. That's clever design, and will always matter more than how many new things Sony wants to make you buy (EyeToy, Wand, Wand extension) on top of their expensive console in order to mimic the functionality of others.

Expand

I'm quoting this just for the sake of quoting it. And not even edited, wow.