At the Game Developers Conference in Brighton this morning, Sony once again showed off their upcoming motion-tracking controller technology during the keynote speech, this time with the emphasis on showing off its “true 3D movement tracking and accuracy”. The device, which was unveiled at E3, uses a wand-like peripheral with built-in accelerometers and a coloured ball at one end which is tracked by the PSEye camera.
“It can track true 3D, whereever I move it will fully track on every axis,” explained SCEE developer services boss Kish Hirani. SCEE’s Colin Hughes also added, “We’re not getting any lag, which we had with the camera-based stuff on PS3 before. It is very quick and responsive.”
The mix of camera tracking and hardware means that the device is ‘aware’ even when it isn’t being seen by the camera. “It tracks the controller based on accelerometer – so you can use it really freely, even behind your back,” said Hirani. “You have great accuracy. There’s a whole spectrum of things you can do with this controller.”
“It picks up all the pitch and movement. It’s precise and responsive – the sphere on [the front] is what the controleller is tracking – it uses the full RGB spectrum for the colours.”
Various Sony in-house teams are reportedly working on projects using the device, despite it still being in the prototype stages. Developers at the conference were told that they could get their hands on kits “if they made a good enough case for one”. Developers waning to make a game for the motion controller need a PSPEye – and prototypes of the actual hardware is available from SCEE account managers, but are in limited quantities at the moment.
