Motion Control

I would like to take a step back today and talk about video games, specifically motion control. You see back in 2006 Nintendo, having previously been focusing on handheld gaming, released the Nintendo Wii a gaming console set to revolutionize the industry. It sounded excellent on paper a game console that would track your movements instead of using a controller. Unfortunately just looking good on paper and actually being good are two different things. The console turned out to have a terrible game library and the graphics were around that of a Childs art project. Worst of all it didn’t do a good job of tracking players movement, it just seemed to get the idea of what the player was trying to do and tried to fill in the rest for itself. It is now almost four years later and the Wii is finally doing what it was trying to do in the first place with the Wii Motion Plus an attachment for the “Wii-mote” that of course you have to pay 35 dollars for, just to make the thing do what you want it to in the first place. Although did all these bugs in the console make people stop buying the system? Nope. The Wii made more than any gaming system ever almost 70 millions dollars as of March 31, 2010. Although Sony and Microsoft didn’t just sit back and take this, after realizing that the Wii practically prints money for Nintendo they decided to dip their toes in the motion control market. Early signs are not good; The Playstation Move is an embarrassingly blatant rip off of the Wii even the controllers look the EXACT same. Kinect, XBOXs turn at motion control, threw the whole controller deal out the window and uses a camera that tracks your movements instead. Now all of these ideas are good but there are two things that game developers are forgetting, if people wanted to get up and move around they will not want to do it playing a video game and secondly Motion control will never be fully immersive until the player gets more feedback than something on a sreen.