There have already been two or three public demonstrations of sword fighting with WM+ - AiLive like a year ago, Nintendo with Wii Sports Resort, and Red Steel 2 has swordfighting as its main mechanic. They seem to work great.

Simulating the IR with accelerometers was not possible because you don't know which direction the remote is moving towards. In a recent video of Red Steel 2 they say they use WM+ when the IR is not seen. Of course the IR is by definition 100% accurate (as far as not accumulating error goes), I'm sure WM+ is not quite as accurate but still seems accurate enough for a lot of applications.

Facial recognition can be done with any camera (as long as it's got a good enough definition to make out features), and voice recognition technology isn't exactly new.

Neither of those are ground breaking.

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The fact of the matter is, neither Natal nor Sony's system is groundbreaking. I'm assuming that the Natal accessory is just an emitter that calculates a 3D environment from detecting how long it takes for the wave to bounce back (like bats.... and Daredevil). Sony's system is just a high-res camera that calculates changes in pixels on each frame, coupled with a higher precision six-axis in a dildo-shaped casing.

Sony could achieve 3D-world tracking through just using their camera to detect when objects get smaller or larger: the smaller they are, the further away from the screen they are.

What I'm basically saying is that neither of the solutions' hardware is groundbreaking, but where credit should really go to is the software engineers who not only are able to turn the 0s and 1s received from these devices into a rendered 3D world but are also able to do it in a way that other developers can implement the technologies easily into their projects.

Again, everything is perfect in sword fighting where you control everything by the orientation of the sword only. When the positioning counts but you have same inclinations (various parrying stances?) that won't work.

I'm sure WM+ will work great with the games that have been designed around its limitations, that's almost circular reasoning. It still doesn't mean that it works well enough at everything that was demo-ed by Sony and MS.

Again, everything is perfect in sword fighting where you control everything by the orientation of the sword only. When the positioning counts but you have same inclinations (various parrying stances?) that won't work.

I'm sure WM+ will work great with the games that have been designed around its limitations, that's almost circular reasoning. It still doesn't mean that it works well enough at everything that was demo-ed by Sony and MS.

I suppose you haven't watched this video. It has a few parts where he controls the height of a sword when the Wii Remote is not pointing forward:

This debate would be much easier if you had actually seen what Wii MotionPlus is capable of.

Not only I have seen it, I have also commented about it in another thread yet. They are calculating the position from angles and accelerations by using biometric data about arm length etc. with respect to a fixed virtual shoulder. Keep your wrist angled with your forearm and that model won't work anymore.

@MrHappySquirrel:

I'm not inflating anything. I worked with interfaces that used Wiimotes and the guys who implemented the software, and I routinely read technical blogs from guys who hack them. Some of the technical limitations are very real, and can't be fixed in any generation of games unless the hardware is changed.

All this conversation started because I said that using an external camera allows you more than the very restricted field-of-view of the camera in the Wiimotes, thus allowing continuous absolute position tracking. I can't see how that is debatable.

All the nice tricks that can be used to replace this tracking in several conditions will allow very good things to be done with the Wiimote and WM+. But it won't be able to do nearly as well with inputs involving precise translation tracking, compounded with big rotations.

Not only I have seen it, I have also commented about it in another thread yet. They are calculating the position from angles and accelerations by using biometric data about arm length etc. with respect to a fixed virtual shoulder. Keep your wrist angled with your forearm and that model won't work anymore.

@MrHappySquirrel:

I'm not inflating anything. I worked with interfaces that used Wiimotes and the guys who implemented the software, and I routinely read technical blogs from guys who hack them. Some of the technical limitations are very real, and can't be fixed in any generation of games unless the hardware is changed.

All this conversation started because I said that using an external camera allows you more than the very restricted field-of-view of the camera in the Wiimotes, thus allowing continuous absolute position tracking. I can't see how that is debatable.

All the nice tricks that can be used to replace this tracking in several conditions will allow very good things to be done with the Wiimote and WM+. But it won't be able to do nearly as well with inputs involving precise translation tracking, compounded with big rotations.