E3 Motion Controls and 3D

So it’s been too long since I wrote anything here, and since E3 just happened, and video games are something that’s important to me I thought I would post some observations regarding these two topics that seemed to dominate the major news coming out of LA last week.

Let’s start with Microsoft, since they were the ones to go first there too. Their new Kinect thing seems sort of nifty, and among the motion controls of all three of the major consoles seems to be the most advanced and best among them. Not relying on any sort of controller the camera watches you and so the movement of your arms and legs and body do all the input. This concept brings two things to mind very quickly to me. First is just a matter of the processing power involved. First the system has to take that picture it has of you and figure out which part of the picture is you. How does it know what part of the picture is you, and which part is the observer in the background? I’m not saying it can’t do this, but it takes system resources to do so. Next now that it knows which part is you it sort of needs to construct a 3D model of you using that picture, and it has to make sure the model moves the same way you do. Again this is going to take a lot of resources. Last it has to take the movements of you/your model and interpret them and turn them into a usable input for the game. No two people are going to move their arm the same way, but some games will need to treat similar movements almost the same, this too is going to take up a lot of resources. Now that you’ve done all this, you can make your game. Your graphics engine, your physics and also your gameplay rules all need to split the remaining processing power, whereas before the motion controls these things are used to getting all the resources of the system. Is Kinect adding more processors and RAM to the 360? If not I think you can only expect low complexity games to use it, kind of like the only things they really showed at the show, and that the games for gamers just can’t run on a 360 with Kinect. Also consider the perspective of developers, even an amazingly designed API from Microsoft making things easy to deal with (example: creating the models for you) is going to make the input portion of coding very complicated compared to “has this button been pushed?” or for your analogue sticks/triggers “how far have these buttons been pushed?”

Nintendo went next, so now for Nintendo. Nothing especially new in terms of motion controls, I think most people are familiar with the Wii, and what it can and can’t do. There is something that came to my mind while watching some video coming from their press conference. They were demoing the upcoming Zelda game, and it was plain to see that basically it wasn’t working. Now things not working like this happen all the time at shows like this, but it reminded me that this happens often whenever I try to use a Wii. There was lots of lag, when you swing, you can expect the swing to happen afterwards, so your movements need to be preemptive, and that’s if it even registers the swing at all. During this demo you would see them swing their arm two or three times sometimes before Link would swing his sword and it reminded me that this happens to me too, and they were using the motion plus device which I’ve never had the chance to use, but is supposed to make things more accurate, and yet this can still happen. Also for those of you who have used a Wii, how many times have you tried to point to something on the screen and not have it work or have it shake all over the place (moreso than should be caused by the fact that your arms won’t stay 100% steady). But perhaps their problems were because they were using unfinished software, and my problems are not design flaws with the system. How about that 3DS thing though? Well if you’re reading this site you may be able to tell some of my feelings towards the current 3D crazy the entertainment industry is going through right now (it’s a scam and not only doesn’t work, but can’t work). So maybe it might be surprising to hear me say that I think this is exactly the way this stuff can be used correctly. It’s completely personal which means you get to be in the one spot that works. It’s also a huge bonus that it doesn’t need glasses. My only concerns are things like the focus problem that I think I may write about in the future, as well as problems with the original DS (if you need to use the stylus for something your wrist that’s holding the device gets very poor support because it’s holding it off to the side to be able to hit buttons). This could be even worse since you can’t really make out the image unless the device is held in a very specific position relative to your eyes. Lastly they’ve gone and made this thing even more unfriendly to lefties than the original DS was. All that said the 3DS doesn’t seem to have the same glaring problems as other 3D things.

Lastly Sony. When talking about the Kinect for the 360 I mentioned resources, well the PS3 has the advantage that when being designed Sony went overboard and added too much processing power to it. Not only that but they’re not trying to do the same complicated thing with the input that Microsoft is, it’s more like the Wii’s much less intensive system. What this says to me is that for complicated physics or graphics systems mixed with motion controls the PS3 is going to be the vastly superior platform. It sounds to me that the Playstation Move system is going to be largely what we all thought and were hoping the Wii was going to be before we actually saw what its limitations were. Plus, the move setup is going to cost roughly the same as a Wii too, and that’s just the camera/controller not the initial investment of the PS3 itself. Two more quick thoughts about move before talking about 3D, first the Playstation Eye, a peripheral for the PS3, was also the name for a PS2 peripheral both cameras. The basic idea behind them I think was basically the same as Microsoft’s Kinect thing, but they weren’t as hyped, nor as complicated and nobody bought them because there were no games that used them worth playing. Next, I kinda like the glowing balls that everyone is saying looks so silly. Now what about 3D games on the PS3? Well even if 3D TVs weren’t so expensive that it was not worth buying one, they are a scam and don’t work (they do work better than movie theatres though). This is a way for Sony to try and boost sales of their own 3D TVs though and in that case a decent marketing ploy.

All in all a fairly dissapointing E3 because instead of announcing interesting sounding games there was just lots of games that were “dance” in front of your TV, as well as “Wii shovelware, now for 360 and PS3″