PlayStation Move vs. Nintendo Wii: Under the Hood

Sony transformed a majestic event space in downtown Seattle into a sea of ​​epic events. Journalists smacked ping-pong balls, brandished swords and scraped hair from imaginary scalps. Five years ago, this demo of Sony’s upcoming PlayStation Move motion controller might have elicited chuckles and raised eyebrows from grown men and women walking by with cocktails in hand. , but this is the post-Wii era. There are no one-eyed bats.

And that could be a problem for Sony. Glowing neon balls are new, but we know the concept very well. Sony’s PlayStation Move looks a lot like a late-to-market and much-hyped version of the Wii.

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So why not the Wii? Despite the overwhelming similarities, Sony’s Move controllers add a new dimension to the motion controls we know and love. Here’s how.

The magic is in the ball

Ask any Sony programmer how the Move differs from the Wii and they’ll have the same veiled look of exhaustion. They had heard that many times tonight.

“We have these!” a Sony developer grinned after pausing for a moment to decide how to cover it for the hundredth time. He holds up colored balls at the top of the Move controllers.

He’s not exaggerating. The ping-pong ball-like shape at the end of the Move controller is exactly what sets Sony’s technology apart from anything Nintendo or even Microsoft will offer. While the accelerometer inside the controller works just like the Wii, the balls provide what Sony calls a zero point – an absolute position in physical space to which the system attaches all other data. .

What?

Sony engineer Anton Mikhailov compares the inertial sensor in the Wii remote to walking in a dark room: You know how fast you’re going and can feel yourself turning around, but you can’t see your surroundings , you have only a vague idea of ​​your true position. , even if you’ve navigated the room dozens of times.

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“The problem with inertial sensors is that they tell you where you’re going but don’t actually know where you’re going,” Mikhailov explains. Although the Wii’s infrared sensor bar gives the remote some pointing capabilities, the triangulation used to roughly plot the Wii remote’s position leads to some uncertainty. . “With the Wii sensor bar, you don’t know if you’re rotating – like in a cursor scenario – or moving. Because of that ambiguity, you can’t tell whether you’re moving through space or not.”

Conversely, the colored ball used on the Move remote tells PlayStation exactly where you are standing in front of the TV. Simple left and right movement of the dots can tell the system where you are on the X and Y axis, while the size of the ball tells the system how close or far away you are from the TV – that important Z axis . Attach all the accelerometer and gyroscope data to that point in space and you have Move.

Untapped potential

Boring technical details aside, does it make any difference? The first headlines certainly make it hard to tell.

Playing with the Move feels a lot like playing with the Wii. You punch, your character punches. You swing, your character swings. You dive, your character dives. There’s definitely more precision, but the playing experience is still the same.

The true potential may yet be untapped by programmers still stuck with the Wii.

Anton starts a technical demo. It takes a live feed of you standing in front of the TV and puts virtual objects in your hands. The remote control becomes a mallet, a globe, a sword. And every movement is transferred smoothly to the screen. You can take a ping pong paddle and rotate it in your hand and watch the object behave similarly.

Wii cannot do this.

In another demo, a controller turns into a rotating clay pipe on the screen. The other controller deforms it like fingers on a virtual ceramic wheel. Additionally, Anton easily repositions poster-like images in 3D space. He can even twist and bend them as if they were real. After a few taps down, he turned one controller into a virtual camera, looking around his newly created virtual living room as if he were there, while moving things around with his other hand. You can open the door with one hand and look out the back with the other. Separate things naturally in 3D without touching the mouse. Shoot 3D movies the same way you would shoot real movies without the need for inconvenient camera controls.

Camera problem

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Relying on a camera for input has its disadvantages. As the sun sets in Seattle, rays of sunlight penetrate the windows and walls above. Sun-hungry Northwest people rejoiced. Sony’s developers cringed.

The Move Near the Sun system has stopped working. While workers outside scrambled to put butcher paper on the offending windows, a live camera feed on the screen reflected the problem. As for Sony’s EyeToy cameras, the entire room is covered in white, including the relatively weak LED bulbs on the Move remote. Without this simple visual cue – easily swept away by the setting sun – the system would be paralyzed.

There are no less precise Wii modes to fall back on – all or none. When your system cannot see the ball, the game is over.

A question about the code

Boxing, bubbles and virtual golf were done. While Sony has developed what could become the most accurate, motion-controlled game console in the world when it launches this fall, it could also come close to making the classic mistake of dangerously self-conscious: prioritizing realism and power over fun.

Are developers up to the challenge of exploiting Move’s most promising capabilities? Just as auto designers build a car around one of the most powerful engine developers ever, success or failure ultimately depends on what they do with it. It.

We will wait and see.

For more about PlayStation Move, see Practice and swing with PlayStation Move.

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