Many Natal features to be available on PS3

I wrote recently about how the differing ways of implementing motion controls on the different console gaming platforms might cause headaches for cross platform development, in particular driving a wedge between the PS3 and 360, which up until now have largely received the same set of games across both platforms essentially bringing the total tap-able HD console market up to Wii sized proportions. At a time when the Wii was showing that HD wasn’t necessary to be successful in this generation of consoles the HD market needed to become a lot more, not less, cohesive. But according to recent reports, cross platform development between Xbox and PS3 in a post Natal world might not be so difficult after all. I guess it was obvious really as they both employ cameras at the centre of their tech but it’s not like Sony went to any lengths to make this clear at E3. Perhaps they just didn’t think that this camera based stuff was ever going to take off in any big way. Here’s an overview of their motion control. What isn’t mentioned there is that Sony’s solution is more Wii like in that you hold two controllers that have buttons and rumble/force feedback available. This was touched on at E3, however what wasn’t really looked at at all at E3 (“at” overkill!) is the fact that because it uses the PS3 eye camera they can do most of the body / face tracking and face / voice recognition stuff also. Here’s a super short article talking about it albeit pretty briefly. Another recent report of  a Sony patent shows that they are looking at scanning in everyday objects to use them to control in game equivalents. Once you have scanned in the object (presumably form multiple angles) it can then track that object and use it to control in game actions, something that Microsoft says they can do also.

So although I am still pretty sure the Xbox tech is probably more capable (it has it’s own dedicated processor and depth sensor that the PS3 eye doesn’t have) it should at least mean that devs can bring a game from one HD platform to the other with it’s camera based features mostly intact. It might also mean that devs will concentrate on just those features shared between the two platforms, ignoring any platform specific features or capabilities leaving only first party titles to fully take advantage of everything that each platform is capable of.

One thing that remains to be fully detailed though is how much processor overhead all these features incur. Natal after all has it’s own processor so there’s nothing additional taxing the Xbox itself when implementing these features. In this sense they come for “free”. The PS3 on the other hand would need to use some of it’s internal processing power to handle things. But what hasn’t been made clear is whether or not Natal will actually come for “free”, as in will it be bundled in with every Xbox at no extra cost or is it something that will be an optional extra expense? Sony also haven’t said if they’re going to do anything to ensure the PS3 Eye gets into more hands or not but at least that’s a known quantity/expense and is already available, what isn’t known is how much the “wands” will cost? In fact almost nothing is known about these. They’re in the prototype stage, the ones at E3 don’t represent what the final ones will look like, cost hasn’t been discussed and there’s been no disclosure of things like the button layout, rumble, internal sensors etc. All we know is that it has buttons/triggers, rumble and some sort of internal sensor (most likely a gyro). Details are few and far between.

All in all I think Microsoft came out with a more focused, branded project and left Sony scrambling to sweep together all the different technologies that they have had available for sometime now but haven’t fully utilised or supported. It looks like they have most of the necessary tech lying around to come up with something roughly equivalent to Natal but are they able to bring it all together in time? After all Microsoft have shown an actual product and let people play actual games with it whereas Sony has only had tech demos and patents to show. Even though they’ve been doing camera based stuff since the PS2 days and even have a camera available for the PSP so far they haven’t given the PS3 Eye much lovin’ but it looks like a lot may suddenly be hinging off it!?

UPDATE: Sony’s balls light up different colours 🙂 and it’s apparently really really accurate. At the E3 conference they said it tracked “with sub millimetre precision”. They also reiterate that the controller has buttons. Well I hope it has a LOT of buttons because then you could use it for REAL games. In fact it would be cool if each wand had four buttons on the “face” and two triggers opposite them making it much like holding a dual shock in two parts. Anything less and I fear it will be doomed to mini game hell.

UPDATE: Urm, maybe like this?!

Ok, this is one of those crappy looking patent application drawings that always make things look a little retarded but this image is from an actual patent lodged by Sony?! Interestingly it includes Ultra Sonic?! Which I assume works with the PS3 Eyes built-in four-capsule microphone array for another level of tracking.

Game gun!

OK, this is kinda amazing?! Screw all the other motion controllers! This guys has them all beat! It’s a gun, it’s a game, it’s GAME GUN!! Amazing!!

The thin end of the wedge…

Sorry for the ramble but there’s been a development in the console wars this generation. Something that hasn’t existed in the last few generations to this great of a degree. Something that is going to fracture the market and make cross platform development next to impossible. Motion control coming to all three platforms could have coalesced the market more but instead it’s going to have the opposite effect because the main players, in a bid to differentiate themselves, have all chosen vastly different ways to control games on their  respective platforms. We have Nintendo’s solely controller based option, Sony’s hybrid controller / camera system and Microsoft’s purely camera based system. In previously hardware generations we saw the evolution of the analogue stick controller to the point where funtionally  they became virtually indistinguishable from each other. In the last gen (PS2, Xbox & Gamecube) they all had dual stick controllers with triggers and a similar number/array of buttons on the face. You knew that if you made a game for one controller it would work on the other two controllers with very little rejigging / button re-mapping required. OK, the Xbox had a couple more buttons (and the gamecube one less) than the Sony dual shock but it wasn’t a big deal for 95% of the games out there to work across all three controllers.

Times have changed. We had a “standard” in the dual analogue that wasn’t perfect but dev’s knew how to control almost any game type/genre using it only requiring minor button re-mapping in some cses. But then along came Nintendo with their waggle stick. The jokes ensued and dev’s were slow to adapt but they finally managed to shoe horn most genres into this new controller with varying degrees of success. It has been adapted to control everything from Sports games, to Shooters and platformers but largely this was due to the fact that it had it’s roots in the old dual analogue, just re-imagined with a little waggle thrown into the mix. With the addition of the “nun-chuck” you still had an array of buttons and triggers and most importantly, in combo with the IR pointing, you could closely approximate dual analogue control.

That was the thin edge of the wedge, it started the trend, it got the ball rolling. Nintendo’s motion control caused a slight rift but not a great divide. If anything the lack of HD graphics causes more issues with cross platform dev. As a result you often had games released for PS360 and then wii games. Now what will happen? Three vastly different control schemes? If Sony release a standard set of “glow sticks” with a standard button configuration on them they might approximate the way the wii works but then you still have the HD/SD divide. Microsoft haven’t announced any such standard controller as although their system doesn’t preclude holding something in your hand while gaming it’s main marketing bullet point is “controller free” control so you will have that divide between what you can do on the 360 and what you can do on the PS3.

Sure the dual analogue reference point still exists (roughly) across all three platforms but to differentiate their platforms the big three  are going to want devs to exploit their respective control systems strengths and thus make their games less likely to work on more than one system? Will they end up developing to the lowest common denominator and not take full advantage of each system and will motion controls standardise over time like the dual analogue did? Who knows, time will tell but things are gonna get worse before they get better.