PlayStation Move
Project Natal’s competitor now has an official name: PlayStation Move. It used to be called PS3 Motion Controller, PlayStation Arc, Gem, or Sphere. And I now have another blog: PlayStation Move.
It is Sony’s version of Project Natal. The differences are: PlayStation Move uses a 2D camera (PlayStation Eye) instead of a 3D camera like Natal, PlayStation Move doesn’t come with software for tracking your whole body (just your hands), and PlayStation Move uses a pair of wand controllers like the Wii remote and Nunchuk.
Sony demonstrated augmented reality with their Motion Controller a lot more than Microsoft did. But augmented reality is actually where Natal has the advantage once everyone has stereoscopic 3D TVs. The PlayStation 3 will be getting stereoscopic 3D support later this year, but without a 3D camera Sony’s augmented reality is going to be strictly 2D, unlike Project Natal’s potential for stereoscopic 3D augmented reality.
Sony haven’t demonstrated voice recognition for PlayStation Move, although it has an array microphone the same as Natal. Sony previously demonstrated speech recognition in their SingStar game though, and claimed it was in their SDK.
Sony have demonstrated a lot of features that would be very useful in existing games and would be easy to add to existing games. Which is something Microsoft hasn’t been good at yet. For example, they’ve shown using it as a pointer, using it in RTS games, FPS games, sports games, etc. Any existing game could be ported from PC or Wii to PlayStation Move in an obvious way with very little effort. And any PlayStation game could be ported to PlayStation Move with very little effort, except for a few missing buttons. But Project Natal hasn’t shown how it will be used as a pointer, or how it will be used in RTS and FPS games, although I’m imagining lots of very cool ways Natal could do that. So I’m expecting PlayStation Move will have more game support, but those games will be less revolutionary than Natal games.
Anyway, see my PlayStation Move blog.
Categories: Project Natal Tags: augmented reality