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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Motion Controller Lag Comparison (Wii,Move,Kinect)

Krill on 10 November 2010

I know this isn't a review thread, but this journalist was cynical about Kinect and the lag issues until he tried it.

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/8122546/Microsoft-Kinect-review.html

"For all the marketing buzz around Kinect, propelling Microsoft's motion-tracking camera into the public consciousness, more telling evidence of the device's propensity to impress has been filtering through social networking sites and forums from all corners of the web. Microsoft's attempt to woo the so called 'casual' crowd away from Nintendo's Wii console and onto their own Xbox 360 was greeted with the utmost cynicism from video game fans and critics alike, including myself. The faintly embarrassing and overly synthetic demo at this year's E3 did Kinect few favours, and rumours that the device suffered from excessive lag and other troubling issues only compounded the negativity surrounding it.

It's been fascinating, then, to see how opinion morphed and shifted as people started to experience Kinect for themselves. Not so much a softening as a complete about turn. Not only did the device work, but it worked brilliantly and, most importantly, was guffaw-inducing fun.

Me? A vocal critic of Kinect in the past, I was convinced five minutes after turning it on."

I'm sure some people here have experienced Kinect for themselves and can therefore speak with some authority, but I fear too many are crapping on something they haven't used.



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Squilliam on 10 November 2010
drkohler said:
Squilliam said:

Actually the most significant difference is whether you're looking for latency or not.

No, the only point is whether you act or react. In a game like table tennis, you always see the white ball coming, and after a short while trying, you learn to precompensate because you know what is happening in the next second. You are therefore acting, by learning to precompensate the processing delay of the system. I've seen many people trying table tennis and everybody missed the shots in the first minutes until they automatically precompensated the lag by acting early (lag which was very noticeable for an outside observer, in the range of 250-300ms, but completely irrelevant to the player(s)). Kinect's table tennis, by the way, is a thoroughly enjoyable game - for about 20-30 minutes until you see how very simple and repetitive the game engine is performing.

Now the problem is games where you have to react, or in other words, you don't know what happens in the next second. Say a shooter where an enemy pops up from behind a cover. There is no way to precompensate a reaction with an early action here, because you just don't know. This will be Kinect's achilles heel, but we already knew that, didn't we?

The shooting example is a very poor one. Theres a reason why bad guys in shooters jump out of cover and then act dumb for a second or two before acting. It is to allow the player to react and then shift the cross hair over. In this case the time it takes to reposition the pointer is analogous to the Kinect delay because it represents a delay in processing a physical movement input. Games are already built with this latency in mind. Theres no effective real difference between repositioning the crosshair with an analogue stick and performing a physical movement. This is the reason why Move for instance is able to get away with one analogue stick. Where Kinect fails is in comparison to buttons because it is a comparison between something with a 0/1 digitial input against something which is more analogue in nature.



Tease.

Damnyouall on 11 November 2010
Krill said:

"I was convinced five minutes after turning it on."


I wonder how many games that require quick and precise actions and reactions he played during this rather extensive period of testing.

...Ah, who am I kidding, there aren't any. And Kinect obviously works well enough for casual games. Not the point of this thread.



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dark_gh0st_b0y on 11 November 2010

about the Wii lag, it depends on the game and the programming

there are games where motion controls are broken, where some times motion is not even recognised and you have to repeat the motion, and games like Mario Kart and Zack and Wiki or Wii Sports Resort where there's no noticable lag at all!!

 

haven't tried Move and Kinect but i plan to buy some time.....



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