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Sony this morning offered developers attending its coding keynote at the Develop Conference in Brighton more details on its new motion controller.
The device, which was unveiled at E3, uses a wand-like peripheral with built-in accelerometers and a coloured ball at one end which is tracked by the PSEye camera.
"It can track true 3D, whereever I move it will fully track on every axis," explained SCEE developer services boss Kish Hirani.
In a demo of the archery game shown at E3, SCEE’s Colin Hughes explained more:
"We’re not getting any lag, which we had with the camera-based stuff on PS3 before. It is very quick and responsive."
The mix of camera tracking and hardware means that the device is ‘aware’ even when it isn’t being seen by the camera.
"It tracks the controller based on acceleromoter – so you can use it really freely, even behind your back," said Hirani. "You have great accuracy."
He added: "There’s a whole spectrum of things you can do with this controller.
"It picks up all the pitch and movement. It’s precise and responsive – the sphere on [the front] is what the controleller is tracking – it uses the full RGB spectrum for the colours."
He added that using the PSEye makes it "a truly interactive device" given its mix of controller hardware, camera and directional microphone.
Developers waning to make a game for the motion controller need a PSPEye – and prototypes of the actual hardware is available from SCEE account managers, but are in limited quantities at the moment. Studios will have to get whitelisted by Sony and discuss their ideas with them before the prototypes become more freely available
And in terms of external middleware the device uses AiLive – which as Hirani pointed out "other devices using motion controllers use" (i.e. Wii – and it’s free to all PS3 developers.
