become a videogame.

At first blush, Sony’s new motion controller for PlayStation 3 seems like a straight-up rip-off of Nintendo’s Wii remote. It’s a one-handed controller with an accelerometer and a gyroscope that you can point and click at your TV screen or wave around like a tennis racket.

The major games that will launch with the peripheral later this month would seem to support that conclusion: Sony is bundling the $100 add-on with Sports Champions, a shameless riff on Wii Sports Resort.

Several other games just use the Move as a virtual firearm — you know, like half the games you’ve played on Wii for the last four years.

But the PlayStation Move does boast a distinctive feature that could be a serious game-changer. The controller is tracked by a camera, called PlayStation Eye, that sits atop your television set. The Eye tracks the position of the glowing sphere at the business end of the Move, and it does this so accurately that it can know the exact position of the controller in 3-D space.

This allows Move to do augmented reality, adding virtual upgrades to real-world images of you and whatever’s in your living room. It also makes possible games that rely on players being able to precisely manipulate the 3-D space in front of them, something the Wii remote can’t do with nearly enough accuracy.

Some of the Move games Wired.com has tried so far provide a brief glimpse at how pairing cameras with controllers could lead to compelling new ways to play — if designers can harness the power of the complementary technologies.

“When you look at the relationship between the controller and the PlayStation Eye camera, and how intrinsic that is to precision and to placing you in one-to-one movement with the character in the game, there’s really nothing else like that,” says PlayStation director of hardware marketing John Koller.

Inexpensive Virtual Reality

Virtual reality on the cheap isn’t just a dream of Sony’s. Earlier this year, during a visit to the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I saw an impressive graduate project — a fully functioning virtual hand that used an off-the-shelf webcam and a specially colored Lycra glove.

As technical director at GAMBIT, Andrew Grant tried to find ways that the tech could be used to play games. He didn’t come away especially impressed.

“It would be awesome to reach into a 3-D world and place things exactly where I want,” he says, but even playing a virtual version of simple block-stacking game Jenga would require far more precision than current technology can provide.

“In Jenga, exactly where you put your hand matters to within millimeters,” Grant says. “With the technologies we have now, inches would be the accuracy to what you’re looking at.”

These hurdles could be overcome, Grant says, with good software. With PlayStation Move likely to end up in millions of homes over the next few years, game developers probably will give it the old college try.

Motion control has been the watchword of the console game business ever since the launch of Wii in 2006. After the unassuming white console’s surprise upset of its more powerful rivals, Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox, it took Nintendo’s competitors time to devise their own solutions. Both launch this fall: Move arrives Sept. 19 and Microsoft’s hands-free camera controller Kinect follows Nov. 4.

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Authors: Chris Kohler

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