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.

My point was that with the Move, the accellerometers and gyroscopes (and apparently magnetic sensors... I would guess this is like an electronic compass, which could negate some of what I have been saying if it can read tiny movements as fast as a camera, though I doubt it) are having to do the majority of the work, and need to be read constantly to determine which way the device is pointing.

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.

So better motion sensors is the new video game dick measuring contest? Figures.

This won't mean squat. The games will matter more.

Good point. Looking at the best selling games, right after Wii Sports and Fit there are the classic original Nintendo brands, the ones that were around long before the Wii. Mario, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Zelda. 

Talking about me, I will always be a Nintendo gamer for these exclusive franchises - I even have to say that most of the Wii-specific features don't really matter to me, an upgraded Gamecube would have been fine. 

I don't think this is necessarily a software problem.... the calculations involved are probably relatively simple for a computer, but the speed at which the accelerometers/gyroscopes etc can make their measurements (then send them wirelessly to the consoles to be calculated, though that should be the same problem for Wii too) is not as fast as for the camera.

So the packet of data sent might contain an image from the IR camera from 0.001 seconds ago, with accellerometer data from 0.005 seconds ago (well it would actually be from the same amount of time ago I should think, but the accelerometer will not have caught up with real world movements as fast)

For the Wii that is not a problem as it only needs the IR data constantly to map cursor movement. The PS3 has to calculate the data from all three of those devices in the Move (then match it with PSeye data).

This article is crap...

all the demoes sucked.... but this should be better than the Wii...

mmmmk.....

oh wait, it's IGN!

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.

As I have said though, I can't be sure... perhaps the compass thing it has inside means less reliance on slow accelerometer tech.

^Basically, yes, I'm saying that I would account only for the translations of the ball on the vertical plane. Mapping this plane to the "aiming" plane is all in the calibration, as the active area could be a 50x30 cm2 rectangle near your lap and the center in a comfortable position.
As for accuracy, i would need to know some more technical details, such as the camera's field of view, to calculate a few rough numbers, but from the user's point of view it would be the same kind of movements of a wiimote pointing based games so the troubles with steady hands would be about the same.
Btw, accelerometers are not slow at all: the Wiimote ones sample at 100Hz, and that's a 5 year old spec. The trouble is that they have scarce resolution, and of course without gyroscopes they are no good at tracking rotations on the horizontal plane. Add gyros though, and you have a lot of fast data.

I think that the compass thing is used to auto-calibrate the gyroscopes on the horizontal plane since it "knows" which angle you started from -relative to the north-south magnetic line- reducing the need to do so explicitly by having to point at the screen.

All speculations, of course. We'll know in due time.

Update: according to the info given at the following dev conference, that's not how they code pointing. They're actually using all the data, including rotations, and projecting the direction to the tv screen plane. Anyway, they say that the standard library that all devs get to use can track all the data from 4 wands in under a frame time (I suppose they mean 1/30th of second) on an SPU. Interesting info in the Eurogamer / Digital foundry report. We'll have to see if the final software can match the theory.

One thing that I keep asking myself: if they started working on this thing way before the Wii was announced, why are they not able to present some decent lag-free demos TODAY?