| TWRoO said: Reading the glowing sphere movement means very little though, that's what I am getting at. If you move the Move (lol) horitontally while pointing at the screen, but without twisting it in any way (1 dimensional movement) then you are, by 1:1 standards, pointing at a new part of the screen. If you do the same movement, but rotate the handle left or right, you could be pointing (as a line of sight down the handle of the device) at the same place all the time, or somewhere vastly different, even though the camera read the same movement in the sphere. ... The Wii remote only needs the accellerometers as a periodic check to make sure you haven't moved the remote vertically (while still pointing at the same position) as well as making sure you haven't turned the remote over while not pointing at the screen. |
Even with the Wii IR camera it's not like the software pointer is exactly where the physical remote is pointing. You rotate the wiimote, the image of the bar LEDs inside the camera translates in some direction, and through factors of calibration and software elaboration the cursor is moved. Think of games like the Conduit where you can change all the factors of speed and bounding box.
A bit like a mouse the movement will be intuitive if by moving the device up the pointer will move up and so on.
As for your example of translating the wand without turning it
a) doesn't make much sense as a user action if you're using the wand to point, and I would not have any problem as a developer of such a game. I'd throw away the lack of rotation and use the translation to move the cursor. If we're pointing, we're not replicating 1:1 anything, strictly speaking.
b) there's no reason in general to imagine that the cursor shoud lie on the intersection of the wiimote direction and the TV plane, really. Why shouldn't we intercept a virtual plane that is 3 meters in front of a 3rd person shooter protagonist? That's all into calibration.
@Demotruk
It may very well be that the final product has so much overhead that it lags, of course I can't really say for sure until the final product is in my hands. Sony promised that they have a latency of 1 frame, which would be perfectly acceptable, and in several reports the testers were happy with the responsiveness of the system (for example the eurogamer guys called the shooting minigame controls "fast and accurate" and immediatly familiar to playes of wii on-rails shooters).
The two exceptions that everybody noted were the demo of SOCOM 4 in alpha state, that exhibited such choppy framerate that any input method would have latency problem, and the fighting game where some testers reported as "laggy" some situations in which the fighetr didn't follow exactly 1:1 their moves. In other words sounds like a bad description of the character following a predetermined animation sequence at some point.
Frankly, I'm dubious about how good the tech will prove in the end, but I won't say that it will surely lag just because it has more overhead than the Wii solution. I'll adjourne until we have further evidence.
