Motion sensing -- The future of gaming?

[mmsven]

After the major E3 conferences, both Sony and Microsoft have jumped on the motion sensing "phenomenon". Nintendo also showed off more of the Wii Motion Plus. Is motion sensing really the future of gaming?

My thoughts on all the projects.

Project Natal (Microsoft) - It's motion sensing without the controller. Very ambitious but it doesn't look good at all. When they demo'd it, it seemed delayed and very buggy on the motion part. There's also a voice recognition part of it, which demonstrated by Peter M's Milo, seems to work better. But the demo for Milo wasn't live so what do we know. The bigger issues? There's no controller, and there's no way to act normally.

Without a controller, Natal falls under previous camera problems. You can't play a real game with it. If I play a racing game, it may be able to detect my hands sway back and forth for steering, but what about my handbrake, acceleration, reverse, rear view, camera view, etc.? The thought of movement controls for each of those is unpractical. What you'll find as games for Natal will be that type Ricochet garbage they showed off. Secondly, there would be no way to talk or move around normally without affecting the gameplay.

They are touting this as an evolution of gaming. I say this technology is more of a gimmick than the wiimote by a mile and they just want their paychecks.
Full E3 demo video

Ball on a Stick (Sony) - I was actually impressed. It may be a ripoff of the Wiimote but it looks like a damn good one. Extremely precise, no delay. They used some very clever demos to show off the precision and features. They used the PS camera to overlay weapons on the stick, and there was no delay or buggy-ness whatsoever. The demos they used weren't casual sports but examples of how it could be used in real games. Just watch the video.
Full E3 demo video

Wiimote (Nintendo) - We should all know the Wiimote doesn't work as well as it was marketed as. It doesn't detect real motion and is somewhat delayed. It's essentially an IR pointer. Nintendo is hoping to fix that with the Wii Motion Plus. While it's frustrating knowing this should've been the original product, what they are offering looks good enough. It doesn't look as precise as Sony's stick but the demos weren't in-depth so I cant tell very much from them.
Full E3 demo video

[acrox999]

I like the first one. Its really awesome! Without any controllers. But I think the sensor is a bit slow.

[death_au]

I agree with all the points you lay out above. As far as I can tell, the XBox and Playstation things work very similarly. Sony has been doing it longer and they've learned the tricks to make it work better. Microsoft has tried to jump the gun and head sony off at the pass, but I don't see it working that well just yet as you mentioned.
The wiimote is... different from the others. The others rely on the camera tracking (which the wiimote kinda does for it's pointing stuff), but the wiimote uses tilt sensing, which the wii motion plus now improves. If you put all that into sony's ball on a stick, and used some nice tricky mathematics in the game code, you could likely have the most accurate motion tracking device currently available. And there are a lot of in-game uses for it.
I believe this is the future, yes. It will never completely replace the controller as we know it, but it will open up many doors to completely new types of gameplay that we haven't even thought of yet.

[random0guy]

Project Natal will get rid of button mashers in fighting games.

[crazy.neo]

This will never be the future of gaming, but it will be another way to play. Probably the future EyeToy and such. Interactivity will always be severely restricted and I think it will feel (at least for me) much less immersive than playing ANY game with an actual controller.

[nobby76]

Dunno if any of you know but one of the main guys behind project natal is Johnny chung lee, the guy who brought us true 3d viewing using a wii controller. he said the maths involved was amazing, he hadnt seen maths like this used in anything to date even in military R&D.
And it wont need buttons to make it work. it creates a full motion capture rig of you ( like those mocap suits that you have all the little dots all over you ) which means it can even follow just finger movements rather than whole hand movements. and regarding things like handbrake and gear shifting, if you watch the advertisement for Natal on XBL the demo of the racing game you see the girl reach for the gear shifter and change it, the handbrake etc would work the same way.. actions such as gear shifting would be done in certain places in your gaming area, such as gear shift is on the right hand roughly next to the steering wheel placement, the hand brake could be down by your left leg, as long as you reach for that general area then it could accept the command, which seems like a logical way to do it.. after all how many times have you ever pulled the handbrake on a car by pressing a button? at least with hand movements you could still have it as an analogue response, the higher you lift your hand, the more you applied the hand brake, which is how it works on a real car.

Even if its not the most amazing thing in the world i can see a hell of a lot of other uses for the natal system besides gaming.. a Mocap studio will cost you around $30,000. a mocap recording suit can cost anywhere up to $25,000, and you can do mocap using a couple of standard video cameras ( which is gonna be a few hundred dollars) all it would take was somebody to create an app to translate the natal data to a PC and hey presto instant mocap recording system, which will be somewhere in between using rgb cameras and using a mocap studio. ( id say closer to the studio or suit rather than the cheap rgb twin/quad camera method )
Plus it has facial recognition as well as voice, they are also touting a live video&voice chat using the natal to interact with your friends.. i can see the natal being used for WAAAY more than just a gaming peripheral .

The ps3 motions controllers look cheap, alltho they seem to give good results. they seem very responsive good update rates, but it still comes back to that one problem, you have to hold something in your hand and flail around ( meaning you could end up chucking it through your tv just like the wiimote ) alltho using a twin controller like they demoed, i can see uses such as MS sea dragon and general spacial awareness.

They both look great, and i think they both have good points and bad points. for gaming i think they will both be good,possibly even amazing. but thinking outside the box for external uses of either system, i think the natal will have a little more to offer us..

[aduro]

You're living in your mind. The Natal live demo was pretty obviously flawed and the whole trailer they showed was pretty much fake

That's not to say that the technology exists, it's just that they need to sell it at an affordable price which basically means it has to suck

Natal is one camera from one point of view. Mocap is impossible with it

Plus it has facial recognition as well as voice

Facial recognition hasn't been shown in real time at all. Voice recognition is definitely going to be the same stupid **** that came bundled with windows 7. It doesn't work.

Project Natal will get rid of button mashers in fighting games.

Haha yeah sure buddy

[amak11]

Sony has had more time then Nintendo to work on motion sensing. Remeber the first eye toy, it showed you on screen bashing things with your hands. The Wii's motion sensing is all based around the controller. There is nothing creative in that.

[Rapt0r]

Or....

We could all stop argueing about something we know nothing about. You can't judge it just by a silly video they show. They all have done one thing or another to make their product look better than what it is. That's the fundamentals of advertising a new product. You can't say which is going to be better than the others because you all don't know because none of you have used any of them.

[amak11]

Or....

We could all stop argueing about something we know nothing about. You can't judge it just by a silly video they show. They all have done one thing or another to make their product look better than what it is. That's the fundamentals of advertising a new product. You can't say which is going to be better than the others because you all don't know because none of you have used any of them.

I'm not saying anything about what they showed, i'm talking about the technology itself. It's been in Sony's closet for for a few years since the failer of the eye toy, and now its bigger then ever.

It may be a ripoff of the Wiimote but it looks like a damn good one. Extremely precise, no delay. They used some very clever demos to show off the precision and features. They used the PS camera to overlay weapons on the stick, and there was no delay or buggy-ness whatsoever.

THis is what i was responding to

[Rapt0r]

It still is a ripoff of the wiimote regardless of how long they've been doing motion capturing and how much better it may happen to be.

[amak11]

Then i can say microsoft ripped off Nintendo and Sony with their controller. The whole gaming industry is filled with rip off products

[Belisario93]

Then i can say microsoft ripped off Nintendo and Sony with their controller. The whole gaming industry is filled with rip off products

It's not only the gaming industry, you find it everywhere.

the only reason companies rip off of each other is because their product won't sell as good without it.

think of it like this: if auto manufacturer A started putting radios in cars, and Manufacturer B didn't "rip off" of manufacturer A, then Manufacturer A would (most likely) get more people to buy their car. Now this is only an example, and there are many other factors that change it (ex. Nintendo/Sony with their motion sensing: Nintendo's Wii didn't sell as well because quality was low and relied too much on the wiimote; Sony's PS3 didn't sell well because of price and had less games that appealed to the gamers. Both had revolutionary technology that the Xbox 360 didn't have, but didn't sell as well).

that's my two cents

[Kotti]

Nintendo's Wii didn't sell as well because quality was low and relied too much on the wiimote; Sony's PS3 didn't sell well because of price and had less games that appealed to the gamers. Both had revolutionary technology that the Xbox 360 didn't have, but didn't sell as well)

Not quite.

And no, motion sensing is not the future of gaming. It will never be as accurate regular controls and there are things that I can't see being made well with motions, my prime example being camera controls.

Sony has had more time then Nintendo to work on motion sensing. Remeber the first eye toy, it showed you on screen bashing things with your hands. The Wii's motion sensing is all based around the controller. There is nothing creative in that.

I disagree with almost everything said here. If Sony has had more time to work on motion sensing, how come the Sixaxis motion sensor is so inaccurate compared to Wiimote's one? The Eye Toy means nothing, it's a camera, every other accessory is a controller (excluding Natal). Nothing creative about Wiimote? xD

That's not to say that the technology exists, it's just that they need to sell it at an affordable price which basically means it has to suck

I may be wrong, but isn't that what was said about PS3 and Blu-Ray?

Btw, did anyone else get the feeling like you had seen it before when you watched Wii Motion Plus/Sports Resorts trailer? In the end the new trailer is nearly the same as the old one and does not in any way shot advantages of Motion Plus.

[TheLastNinja]

Imagine playing Ninja Gaiden with Sony's new motion sensing stuff. Using the bow & arrow/ninja stars/sword.