Sony’s answer to Natal: The Motion Controller
So it seems like this is the E3 of new controllers (or lack thereof). The buzz coming off Microsoft’s announcement of Natal hasn’t even reached its peak (much less began to dissipate!) when Sony came out and announced their own vision for the controller of the future. Now, unlike the Microsoft thing, the Motion Controller is still indeed a controller, but Sony Playstation CEO Jack Tretton took stabs at Microsoft and Nintendo, claiming this technology was “not some vision of the future, but here and now”, and did a lot more than get “some folks in retirement homes to pick up a video game”, respectively.
Like the Microsoft technology, Sony’s controller is also rooted in real-time video capture and processing. Although Tretton claimed the technology will go into production in Spring 2010, the tech demo still had very much a “lab test” quality to it. The demonstrator had trouble hitting things with his virtual racket/baseball bat, and there clearly plenty of quirks still to be worked out. Moreover, one can argue that the Motion Controller is little more than the Wiimote finally done right (without the lag and the limitations on possible gestures). On the other hand, unlike the Microsoft demo which largely focused on the sheer “wow factor”, Sony did not shy away from demonstrating the technically hard to do things, like writing, and the ability to make very small precise movements accurately, so it’s plausible that their technology is indeed closer to being market-ready than Microsoft’s.
Regardless of which technology impressed you more, the bigger and more important message in my mind, however, is the one that BOTH companies seem to be sending to Nintendo: “yes, motion based game controls are the wave of the future, but you’ve jumped too early and picked the wrong technology to do it: it’s not about gyroscopes; it’s about video.”
