Project Natal and Playstation Arc: the future of motion controls
By Dean • Feb 15th, 2010 • Category: Uncategorized- Photo: Wikimedia commons
The Nintendo Wii and its Wiimote ushered in a new generation of scaled back, motion controlled video gaming. This, in part, helped net Nintendo millions of buyers who were not accustomed to purchasing consoles, giving it a sales advantage over the PS3 and Xbox 360. Sony and Microsoft soon introduced motion controllers of their own, officially ushering motion controls into the home.
Motion control implementation
- Photo: Wikimedia commons
Nintendo’s motion controller uses an infrared transmitter, which is placed above the television with the Wiimote. Out of the box, the controller’s responsiveness was loosely accurate, but purists argued the translation was not one-to-one. To quell these complaints, and to generate more revenue, Nintendo released the Wii Motion Plus add-on. This led to significantly improved on-screen responsiveness.
The Playstation 3 Arc is the most like Nintendo’s in terms of how it works. The motion controller, which looks like a wand with a glowing orb on top of it, transmits a signal to the Playstation Eye – Sony’s proprietary camera technology. What the eye receives in terms of motion will be displayed on the screen. From an accuracy perspective, the Arc is highly responsive, certainly more so than the Wii, and so much so that many feel the controller is twitchy.
- Photo: Wikimedia commons
The Xbox 360 Natal is the greatest departure from Nintendo’s motion controller. Instead of using a controller to send motion instructions to the receiver, a high-sensing Microsoft camera, the Natal detects full body movement. So where the Wiimote and Playstation Arc require the swinging of their controls to mimic a tennis stroke, for example, with Natal your body is sufficient for this. The pixel-to-pixel accuracy is slack compared with the Arc, but the general flexibility is superior to both the Wii and Playstation motion technology. You will not use your Natal for video gaming only. A flick of the wrist could change a song in your Xbox media player, for example.
The future
Motion technology has come further in the last four years than ever before, and since Sony and Microsoft are vertically integrated companies, it stands to reason that we will see this technology in other electronics programs. The advantage afforded by a controller-less interface is the removal of artificial barriers for a video gaming industry notorious for being too complex for newcomers, but for other consumer electronics and commercial applications, the implications can have far reaching consequences.
Tags for this article: motion controller, video gaming
This is by far the worst blog that explained how all three motion controller work.
ie. “The motion controller, which looks like a wand with a glowing orb on top of it, transmits a signal to the Playstation Eye”
The PS3 controller do transmit wireless bluetooth signal to indicate the orientation of the controller similar like the wii, however, The “glowing org” does not send the 1:1 location of the controller, but the PS3 take the image or the org that is taken from PS Eye and translate that into X-Y position. The size of the orb image translate into distance between the Eye and the orb, the closer the orb to the eye, the big the image, the farther the orb to the Eye, the smaller image of the orb.
If you don’t how it work, PLEASE do not blog and misled the reader.
Hey Anhyly, comments are always appreciated but bear in mind, I was giving a basic explanation of the tech. I falsified nothing. What you do with the Arc translates into what is seen on-screen – I admittedly left the steps in between out.
Again, feedback is always appreciated, but we try write so that the tech is understandable by everybody, not just the tech savvy.