Nintendo: Natal and PS3 Wand are Technology not Fun

Except the PS3 wand thingie has internal sensors in it. Also both PS3-Wand and Natal can track in 3d space, so can figure out speed and acceloration and there fore get force.


Because there's no story?

'Who's got the prettiest picture. Who's got high-definition. Who has the best processing power?'

Sony & MS do and now they have your main factor, Madworld in HD!, sounds like fun to me Reggie.

Even if you mention newton's laws, you think people will start thinking to use the basics. No they can't. Very simple example, stand up and press down on the floor with your left leg without your right foot leaving the floor. Now you're doing something that motion tracking (Natal and PS3 wands) can't detect but motion sensing (Wiimote, Balance Board) can...a force that can lead to motion.

Natal and the PS3 wands just know that you may have slightly tilted your balance but never why. Basic fysics, you cannot know the force behind a object if you only know its speed or chainging positions, you also need to know it's mass, aerodynamic features and so forth. The Wii circumvents this by detecting the very source of motion, force.

@ haritori, Madworld would bomb even worse on HD-consoles just like Killer 7 on the PS2, or jet set radio on the Xbox (well actually, every game with arty colour shemes bombs by default on xbox-consoles), or Okami on the PS2 or Viewtifull Joe on the PS2 and so forth. And the first three things didn't do them much untill now did it...sheesh.

ok, so the ps3 and xbox have better technology then the wii, this doesnt mean they aren't fun though, infact the superior technology to me is much more entertaining, being able to watch movies on the net on the xbox, getting better picture quality on both machines and being able to browse the internet and watch blu ray films on the ps3. all of this beats the wii's entertainment factor putting it in third place behind the ps3 and xbox in terms of 'fun'.

Sam wrote:


Totally agree. I own a Wii and a PS3, but, personally, find more value in my PS3. It's just as much "fun" as my Wii. If the wand works half as well as I hope, the Wii will definitely collect some dust =)

wiimote with wiimotion plus = 1to1 perfect 3d motion controls with 1mm perfection and a true perfect aim ir mouse pointer


ps3 motion has no perfect pointer and its motion sensing is only 1cm accurate its no were near wii motion plus or wiimote mouse pointer it simply does not compete

also no speaker no rumble and no nunchuck type analog stick so no fps motion controls


its a weak copy wii motion and other controls conbined kill ps3 motion and natal


natal no feed back no rumble no speaker no fuking controls at all = better eyetoy and thats all

no fps fpa rts rta advantage no analog stick and 50% of demos and promos were faked


scan the skate borad then not use it that didnt even make sense


there both waggle fest ideas wave about ideas there not 1to1 perfection with ainm and traditional analog combanation controls like wii and therws no speaker or rumble


THERE FOR THERE WEAK COPYS

WII HD WITH DUAL WII MOTION PLUS AND DUAL IR POINTER MOUSE AND A WIISPEAK AND CAM IN THE BOX FOR A RETAIL PRICE = TO WIIS SAY END 2010


DESTROYS MICROSOFTS HOPES AND SONYS

A WII PRICE DROP TO SUM 100 POUNDS SUM 150 DOLLARS AGAIN DESTROYS THE COMPETITIONS DREAMS


ITS OVER NINTENDO HAS ALREADY WON
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MICROSOFT DOESN'T HAVE REAL 3D ETRHER ITS JUST EYETOY ADVANCE ITS IMPOSABLE TO DO FAST PERFECT FPS ETC VIA NATAL

ITS IMPOSABLE TO MIX NATAL WITH A ANALOG STICK

AND ITS IMPOSABLE TO GET RUMBLE OR SOUND FEED BACK IN UR HANDS WITH NATAL


SONY AND MICROSOFT CLEARLY CANNOT COMPETE

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FANBOY SHUT UP EVERY SINGLE IN DEPTH ARTICLE CLEARLY STATES 7MM SQUARE ACCURATE

STOP SUCKING UP TO SONY THERE LIARS THERE GAMING HOSTORY CLEARLY PROVES IT

COMPARE SONYS MOTION LIKE THIS SONY ANALOG VS NINTENDO

NO CONTEST AND IT WILL BE THE SAME WITH MOTION I PUT MY LIFE ON IT MY SOUL MY CHILDRENS SOULS

SONY USED CAMS NINTENDO HAD ALREADY REJECTED CAMS

SO WHAT ENGINEERING DESIGN REASON WAS THAT

CAMS ARE WEAK AT MOTION SENSING GET IT THRU UR SONY LOVING HEAD

STOP THE WHOLE SONY IS BETTER WEN HISTORY PROVES OTHERWISE


RUMBLE PAKS NINTENDOS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN BETTER

ANALOG STICKS NINTENDOS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN BETTER

LOADTIMES AGAIN BETTER

CONSOLE BUILD QUALITY AGAIJN BETTR PLEASE SEE SONY FOR WHAT THEY ARE

AND THE SONY MOTION CONTROLS HAVE BASIC ACCELORSENSER THINGS IN THEM NO BETTER THAN NUNCHUCK

THE ORBS ARE FOR MOTION TRACKING not perfect fps like aiming or mouse

its not accurate and its not 1to1 and its no match for wii motion plus

and WERES THE ANALOG STICK

JESUS FRIEND 2+2=4 AND 4 ONLY NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES SONY TELL YOU THE ANSWER IS 6.7


AND COPYING IS GOD DAM GAY INNOVATING IS GENIUS

do you fan copiers and thiefs because i dont Reply
6/6
wiiboy101uk posted on 8 Jun 2009 18:07
posts of mine from other blogs...ABOVE ILL JUST RE CAP FOR STUPID SONY/MICROSOFT FANS.....

wiimote ir mouse pointer 1to1 acurate in realtime to a good 1mm square= perfect 3d mouse FPS SHOOT AND AIM CONTROLS..

ps3 orbs are for tracking not perfect pointing (ps3 motion fails) FACTUAL FANBOYS DON'T DARE ARGUE THE FACTS...... NO FPS AIM SHOOT


ps3 motion sensing and cam tracking is confirmed by sony them selfs to be 7mm square accurate thats around 1cm sqaure and with sony nown for lieing im guessing its even worse than there saying 7mm to 1cm square is far from accurate its no better than six axis or nunchuck its no were near wiimotes tight 3d motion AND IS LEFT FOR DEAD BY WII-MOTION-PLUS

ITS LIKE THIS combine sixaxis weak sensing with orbs a camera can track ITS A WAVEY WAVEY CONTROLLER NOT A PERFECT 3D INTERFACE LIKE wiimote and wimote plus wii motion plus GET IT NOW

theres also no analog (huh stupid) and possible no rumble and no imursion speaker speakers SO ITS A PILE OF CRAP OBVIOUSLY

WII MOTION PLUS IS 3D MOTION 1TO1 PERFECT AND 1TO1 PERFECT 3D MOTION PHYSICS PS3 MOTION IS FOR WAVING = HIGHLY GAY CASUAL CRAP

NATAL NO aim pointer mouse no analog stick no rumble and just frayling about eyetoy advance controls totally casual and un core


add balance board both natal and ps3 motion support falls behind further

ADD 3rd PARTYS ARE BRINGING EYETOY CAMS WITH SOFTWARE TO WII AS AN EXTRA ubisoft have a wii fitness game with its own motion cam included

now imagine wiimote nunchuck wiimotion plus and eyetoy cam COMBINED

I CLEARLY SEE WITH MY EYES AND THINK WITH MY BRAIN

WHO ARE SONY TRYING TO KID WHO ARE MICRSOFT TRYING TO KID

IMITATION IS SUICIDE AND MIMICRY THE ACTIONS OF THE UN-TALENTED

wii HD CAN RELEAE ANYTIME NINTENDO WANTS TO 2010 ON WARDS

Whilst it's hardly suprising, this is quite simply Reggie defending Nintendo. I doubt very much he viewed the 2 press conferences and thought the above.

Awesome Fool
http://www.Project-Natal.com

To be strict there you're not doing motion tracking or motion detection. If there's no movement (i.e. your right foot hasn't moved) then you can't detect it.

What's happening there is that the balance board (not the Wii Remote or the Nunchuck) is using a stress gauge to measure the force of your foot pushing down.


Again, only the balance board does, and it's got a pretty limited set of applications compared to motion detection/tracking.

I can't think of many gaming situations where the balance board has the avantage. For example, there's no reason that Natal or PS-Eye couldn't detect a lack of balance when you're doing Wii-fit-like yoga. Being cameras, of course, they can assess your form too, which the Balance board absolutely can't.

I think there's good and bad points to all of the systems, which is good - we'll get some unique games and applications out of them.

Personally though, I think there's more promise with the PS3 solution, you have the combination of controller buttons, camera and motion inputs which seems to be a combination of the Wii Remote with Wii Motion Plus and Natal without the major drawbacks of either. It's just a pity the demo unit has a dildo-like appearance. :-)

It's just an example how force can be applied but go undetected by motion tracking but can be tracked by motion sensing.
The Wiimote (Plus) can detect differences in force. Red Steel 2 demo has it, the WiiSports basketball has it, probably the tennis stuff (if done properly) has it too. That's probably what Nintendo found out in their experiments, that camera's can't detect the very origin of motion, force. Motion sensors can and so can have a potentially more accurate representation of motion.

That's the actual point.

At Optimus P. Well force = mass x accelleration. The thing you are swinging (like a tennis racket or a club) in the game makes up the mass and it only actually exits in the game. Therefore since the camera can detect the accelleration of your hand or the controller moving (and since the mass of your hand + the controller is constant so a ball park figure would surfice) ti can calculate the force that would be being exterted in the game world if it were real life. As for the pressing your foot into the ground thing, when would you ever need to detect pressure in a game where movement isn't involved unless you were pressing a button? Having said that, I think motion controls are only really useful for casual sport type games where position and speed are really more than enough.

And at wiiboy101, sorry to burst your bubble but the wiimote does use a camera. The difference is that the camera is in the wiimote and it detects the infra red emmitter you set on your tv. Basically, it is very similar to the ps3 motion controller in reverse. Oh and how exactly are nintendo's analogue sticks far superior to the 360 and the PS3?

Did you not read what he said? How can you do "motion sensing" when noting is moving?

People, it's an example of how force can go undetected by motion tracking, i knew people will take it completly out of context.
Force= mass x acelleration only applies in vacuum environments and since i don't think you want to be sucked into a vacuum yet and die horribly, it doesn't apply. You also have to take into account aerodynamic features and other kind of ressistances.
Also the difference in mass of a child's arm (you're moving your arm mostly) and an adult's is huge, ballpark figures won't work. And for a lot sportgames, you actually need to know the force to add the extra accuracy. You swing golfclubs with less and more force but with equal speed, camera's can't pick this up, Wiimote can. Same with tennis, basketball and so forth.

Just to clear up, this is meant to rebuke all those extremely hypothetical claimes that Natal and the PS3 wands are as or even more (by some magic) accurate then WiiMotion Plus. They can't on a very basic level since they can't detect force. The fantastic thing is, people concluded this already with the original Eyetoy, but have all very handily forgot about it.

Wii Motion Plus only adds a (very accurate) gyroscope to the normal Wii Remote. This means all it adds is more accurate rotational detection.

The normal Wii Remote only contains an accelerometer which means it can only measure translational movement with any accuracy. That means in F=MA, the Wii Remote measures A, not F. You can try to calculate F because the Wii remote's weight is a known value, but as you point out, you can't compensate for player strength versus arm weight or air resistance. In all practical purposes, however, the air resistance, player strength and arm mass are more or less cancelled out and you're looking at speed through the air anyway.

The important point here is that there is no direct measurement of force from the Wii Remote or Wii Motion Plus. Only the after effects of that force on the relative position and orientation of the Wii Remote its self can be measured.

Project Natal as a purely camera-based technology does not have these accelerometers or gyroscopes to supplement it's motion tracking with. Here your assertions are correct, as far as I understand things.

However, the PS3 solution is not just a camera, it has "internal sensors", which I'm assuming will be gyroscopes to measure rotation and almost all translation will be measured by the PS-Eye software using the glowing ball as a target to track. There may be back-up accelerometers in the controller, but they will probably only be used when the ball is occluded from the camera by the player's own body.

Because the PS-Eye camera its self is a fixed point within the system, the position detection is more accurate than with the Wii and can give an almost exact position in 3D space to the game. Look at the building blocks demo for an example of this. Look at the handwriting demo, the tech guy claims "sub-milimeter" tracking of the glowing ball.

The Wii system, when not using the sensor bar, can only measure displacement and can not give a position in 3D space.

So I'd say you were right about Natal, but all the evidence I can find points to the PS3 solution being more accurate than the Wii Remote, even with Wii Motion Plus since it includes the same internal sensors, but has a more accurate position tracking system.

None of this has any bearing on which will make the best games though.

Actually, and this will sound very silly, you're actually reinforcing my point, sure you cant argue physics, but can argue how they are used in your reasoning. How do you measure A in physics? By doing F/M (F=AM so offcourse F/M= A). The wiimote can not know A if does not sense any form of F. There is no other feasible way, The Wiimote does indeed not know where it is in a 3D space sans the sensor bar, but that thing doesn't come into play when playing Wiitennis and stuff. I think the Wiimote sees M as its own weight and keeps it constant. Since the device doing the motionsensing is the device you're also moving, other variables do indeed cancel each other out because the Wiimote becomes it's own self-contained physics object. This doesn't apply to camera's because they track the objects that you move, they're not the object in question.

I say this because of if you click further on the wiki page to actual page of the acceloremeter, they mention that the Wiimote can sense up to 3g. now g's is another way of saying that a force is working on an object relative to the object's weight. And then i remembered, the accelerometer consist of microscopic "hairs" inside sensortubes (I think, this was posted somewhere, shallow google search hasn't come up with anything yet). So if you swing the Wii-mote, the counter-force (another Newton law, every force creates at the same time a equal counter-force) that works on the Wiimote makes these hairs move and such the Wiimote knows the force, the direction and the acceleration. But it also means the Wiimote has an maximum limit to the amount of force it can detect. Possibly also, the Wiimote could not work in low and zoro-gravity environments.

Now before anyone asks. Camera's track motion. They track acceleration and speed by using 3D coördinates. These coördinates tells them the distance and they also know the time travelled, the rest is simpel math (distance/time= speed, speed/time= acceleration). So yes it does know A, but it has no way to know what M or F is, both not being constant in the context of using the camera.
If the PS3 wands indeed have accelerometers built in, the PS3 wands are actually superior to the Wiimotion Plus and sensor bar combo. If not, then the PS3 wands are still better (a bit) at 3D-movement tracking ( i like that block building demo they showed at Sony, it woke up my duplo building days as a child ^^)but somewhat less (also a bit) accurate in motion-sensing.
I think Nintendo probably wanted to combine both but chose the most efficient and price-quality solution at the time. Sony however can profit from three years of extra development (and price-lowering) in technology.

And Natal...does anyone actually know how Natal works...like really?

Man i feel like back in physics class in high-school...

Quite a few ways, not least is displacement over time over time. This has the advantage of being an observation of the moving object and hence not worrying about air resistance or force at all. That's how a purely camera-based system like Natal or PS-Eye would work.


That's very true, but the way the sensor works and the way the Wii Remote gets that information is quite different. The sensor works on the momentum of a known weight affecting the capacitance between the weight and the outside of the tube.

In actual fact, the sensor just picks up changes in the value of an electrical quantity, not force, not acceleration or any other "physical" quantity. The controller on the sensor converts that to an acceleration value and feeds that out to the Wii Remote.


Actually, g is the symbol for the value of the physical constant of acceleration due to the Earth's gravity, usually expressed as 9.8m/s/s (or 32.2 ft/s/s). It's not the force of gravity, that would be measured in Newtons, not m/s/s.


Yeah, it's an advanced version of the Eye-Toy/PS-Eye approach that also uses a depth sensor apparently based on "an infrared projector combined with a monochrome CMOS sensor" which enables accurate 3D tracking. Then the "custom processor running proprietary software" works out position, speed and acceleration, etc.


Me too! :-)

Man, these controllers are sophisticated these days! The question remains though, it seems the Wiimote still can sense certain differences in force applied to it (so many demo's seems to confirm this, WiiTap shows this off at an even very low-force level) up to a certain maximum. What i can gather what you are saying. These sensor hairs inside the Wiimote have a certain resistance, depending on the momentum going on , these hairs touch more of the tube and such send more electrical signals making the Wiimote "sense" higher accerelation levels. So it doesn't really know what force is being exerted on it, but knows differences trough differences in momentum. So it actually uses (but doesn't really sense it) counter-force and newton's law of slowness (i don't know what the proper english saying for it is, but it's the principle that has kept the earth plunging into the sun for these billions of years, or why you're body moves left while you are turning right with your car). It's fantastic!


I think the guys on the site meant G-forces (the ones you get from breaking really hard), not actually g (as it indeed, it refers to gravity, stupid me)


Gaming forums would be a lot nicer if everyone did it this way ^^

@sahave Wii Internet and I can watch anything on my wii. I just need to find it on the web.

Even so some aspects of Natal have yet to be fully witnessed by a non Microsoft representative. We have yet to see scanning done in real time. It is possible what we have seen at E3 was real though; because the eye toy already incorporated a gameplay similar to the demo seen with the balls. But I began doing some research on the subject. On the Milo video, what could have easily been scripted; we have yet to see this in real time. If this was so called operational why not show it in real time. I even tried this with Dora the Explorer. I watched a small clip, then began rehearsing movements and and a script. I even tricked my cousin into doing this with the wii and youtube. I simply maximized the screen to fit the length of youtube screen with in my tv screen. I played wii i learned the video with wii fit with the soccer game and pretended to move around and smack the ball with my hand. I fooled my cousin into thinking wii's could track bodily movements; of course he hadn't played a wii before. I even made him think you could use voice control to select and use head nods. The trailer they showed could have been easily scripted. Some aspects are not that far fetched. When the boy scanned the board notice that his fingers cover some of the upper left corner, although when the board appears on the screen there are no cut outs. The karate game when the kid finishes his body doesn't fully pivot but the karate man does. This same anomaly happens again when the mother and daughter play soccer when the daughter scores the mom imedietly places her hands on her head but the player in the game doesn't and when the daughter celebrates it doesn't show you how the in game character reacts to her sudden movements and her around the room victory dance. In the skate board game the in game skateboarder rides along side a small hill involuntarily, which makes you wonder how much control you truly have. When the girl checks out her dress her hand is placed on her hip, but in real life both hands stay at about a 10-30 degree angle. Did anyone else notice that when that kudo guy was moving it looked like all his bones broke? Now you are asking me why would X Box do this, but it's simply. The wanted to divert attention and try to gain all this yay factor. It could be just a simple market ploy that will fall harder than a brick. With everyone copying nintendo I even heard of Nintendo using body movements to incorporate games. Like using a head nod to select commands which i talked about earlier. I hoped you enjoyed my hatred towards PS3 and 360.(Just for biting idead like a bad sitcom episode).

Try using the trick I did on unsaspecting people. It works!

I think in these cases, the Wii is just picking up small but sudden changes in the value from one of the accelerometers. Obviously, the smaller the force applied, the smaller the resultant acceleration, but even if the controller is resting on your knee, you'll get some "bounce" that will affect the sensor.

I think even Natal could sense this sort of thing, but you'd have to exaggerate the movement a bit. Look at the video where they family is playing a quiz game. Obviously the video is faked or an advertising "ideal" situation, but the principle is there. The amount of movement you'd require depends on the resolution of Natal's sensors.


I think you're getting at Conservation of Momentum. And don't worry about your English, if it's not your first language you're expressing yourself very well. Certainly better than I can in another language.

Conservation of momentum is what keeps the accelerometer's weight going in the same direction for a while after the body of the sensor has started moving in another direction. That affects the capacitance in the sensor and enables it to detect the motion.


G-forces are still accelerations ("The g-force of an object is its acceleration relative to free-fall"). You're experiencing the acceleration in a new direction due to Conservation of momentum keeping your body moving in the "old" direction. G=force is measured in g.


Wouldn't they just? It's always nice to have a conversation like this rather than a screaming argument, which many people seem to devolve to quite quickly. :-)