Sony PS3 to Battle Wii With VR/3D Game Controller? April 13, 2007
Read more Consoles , Gadgets , Games , PS3 , Peripherals , Technology
Sony's getting desperate to goose the popularity of its slow-selling PS3, digging deep into its idea basket to catch up to the popularity of the Nintendo Wii. Apparently the company's plan of attack is to develop a VR/3-D controller, illustrated in this patent application for a "handheld computer interactive device" spotted today.
It takes the abilities of the Wii controller a step further, where in addition to determining where your hand is in 3D space, sensors in the glove can be triggered by individual fingers, letting you grasp objects or assign each finger to a different function. Added to that is tactile feedback. Hmm. – Charlie White
VR/3D Controller for your Sony PS3 [Unwired View]
Editor | Martin Lynch
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Power glove anyone?
Great idea, but someone still needs to release a 6-axis wearable VR headset to go with it. The last time the marketing people tried VR, the technology just wasn't there yet. Now its ALL there. The GPUs are fast enough, the screens are lightweight enough to wear on your head and 6-axis 3D space-sensing controllers are commonplace. Its all just waiting for some young enterprising exec to put all the bits together and market a full VR system for the Wii, PS3 or Xbox360. Imagine Halo played through a VR headset, with the ability to simply look from side to side to check your six as you make a dash for cover. Awesome. And all the technology is there ready and waiting to be marketed.
You're completely true Alex.
After having led the development of such a product, 3 years later and having spend 32000$CAD of provincial government subventions in R&D for prototyping the first complete unit, I can say you are completely true. But why on PS3, XBox360 or even Wii, when another unit able to run PC games could easily be implemented to give to a nice market what they're craving for, yet under the 999,99$USD bar?? Stay tuned Alex. We're very interested in visionnary talents like you. This is impressing us much more that this weird glove patent. Why would more than 80% of gamers want tactile feedback at finger level? I am personnally what I consider a visionnary hardware/software developper, and I can hardly see this innovation fill a gap in modern gameplay. The next standardisation will be at least basic motion capture for all future input devices, like Camera movement detection will be for the next XBox, but the real next big revolution will be, in my opinion, what is driving our soon-to-be-released platform; head-mounted LCD/OLED display (one for each eye), offering stereovideo graphics. Hope you already know what it means because it is hard to figure out the result of this technology only reading words; but in short, 3D depth perception. You don't need half the raw power of a PS3 to generate this effect, as your brain acts like a 3-dimension decoder; your brain is much faster than their Cell. This will for sure be the next graphical revolution. And because it doesn't require the hardware to be uber-powerful, the price of medium-quality hardware will for sure help a company found in a garage to take out for a launch at a quite competitive retail price point. Resolution is one thing; you can look at 15GB of hi-res textures on your 60-inches HDTV with 1080p HDMI, you're still watching at a 2D render (aka representation) of a 3D scene. That means that you're loosing the most important dimension of 3D; the third one! Depth perception and 360-degree immersion. Stereovideo is the key to the next revolution and here at .......... we're working since 3 years with this technology. But more important, who means headset also mean that you can easily capture head position and movement via a 27MHz radio gyroscopic sensor and translate it to control over the mouse input in ANY games, even if they're not designed to take it into account. Of course, first-person games are way more interesting for headtracking capability, like in Test Drive Unlimited in car-interior camera view, or in Counter-Strike Source. This gives 360-degrees of digital immersion. Give it a mouse with gyroscopic capability and a 4-button trigger, much like a Gyration Airmouse mixed with a BodyPad right grip and this is, in our opinion, the closest thing to feel like virtual reality under the four-digit pricepoint.
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Uhm, what with head-displays, surely there is going to be some problems with eye-health? Even if there isnt theres going to be public beliefe that its not too good for you. Next, with VR.. how do you move? I understand how to look and interact with your hands, but movement forward etc, leaning would be a nusence, VR boots are out of the question.. Im just curious.
I dont think a VR console will catch on for a while, no matter how revolutionary.