motion control

Nintendo has sold an average of 46,000 Wii Remotes every day since the Wii's launch in November 2006, the company announced yesterday.

All told, Nintendo has sold 65.3 million Wii Remotes to consumers in the United States. About 30.41 million of those units were bundled with the Wii, while 12.92 million Wii Remotes came in the Wii Play bundle. Nintendo has sold 18.56 million individual white Wii Remotes and 2.44 million black versions of the controller. It has also sold 467,500 pink Wii Remotes and 465,200 blue Wii Remotes, the company … Read more

LOS ANGELES--After trying out both the Microsoft Kinect and Nintendo 3DS, we got to test-drive the third big hardware product of E3 2010, Sony's PlayStation Move. We've actually tried the Move before, at its original announcement during the Game Developers Conference earlier in 2010, but this was our chance to dive deeper into some of the launch games.

Of the three major motion-control peripherals for game consoles, the Wiimote, Kinect camera, and Move controller, it's Sony's device that looks the most garish. The black flashlight handle stick is topped with a ball that can change color, depending on its use in a particular game (the ball is actually soft to the touch, which always seems to surprise people), and it looks a lot more like game hardware than Nintendo's understated white controller or the Kinect's multimedia-looking Webcam.

Aside from that, we'd have to say that in terms of acting purely as a video game peripheral, the PlayStation Move is currently our favorite entry in the motion control competition. Kinect works well enough, but it's not always as responsive as you'd want, or at least that's how some of the games we tried felt. Plus, Kinect's opening game lineup is somewhat generic, with more proof-of-concept games than titles that would stand up without the Kinect tie-in. In fact, the Kinect's biggest strength has been largely unheralded--it's excellent ability to recognize and respond to voice commands, which is useful for home theater tasks.… Read more

LOS ANGELES--Can someone please tell me why we've spent the last two days rehashing the highlights of E3 2009?

If you were here for last year's video game mega-convention, you will recall that the big news from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo was the true dawn of the motion control wars. Microsoft unveiled Project Natal, Sony showed off its prototype system, and Nintendo pulled back the wraps on some new improvements to the Wii Motion Plus.

All told, these innovations were going to take us to the next level of video game play, where it's all about gesture-based control and traditional button-based controllers became a thing of the past.

Flash forward to this week, though, and the highlights of the press conferences, at least Sony's and Microsoft's, seem someone familiar. Let's recap. At Microsoft's event on Monday, the biggest news was the formal unveiling of Kinect. This, of course, used to be known as Project Natal.

Microsoft announced that the device would be available November 4 and was able for the first time to name some actual games that will be Kinect-enabled. There will be 15 launch titles, including Ubisoft's Michael Jackson game, as well as six that were featured during the press event, Dance Central, a dancing game from Rock Band developer Harmonix; Kinect Sports, a game that offers soccer, bowling, track, and more; Kinect Joy Ride, a racing game; Kinect Adventures, a game for navigating down rivers and railroad tracks while trying to hit targets; Your Shape, an exercise game; and Kinectimals. However, the demo was very much like the one from a year earlier. … Read more

Patent No. 7,679,604--"Method and apparatus for controlling a computer system"--the broad motion-control patent I've been writing about this week, has passed through a number of hands over the years.

First assigned to ArrayComm in 2006, it was subsequently handed over to Durham Logistics, a limited liability company which is itself managed by another obscure Las Vegas LLC called Memscom. But there's one more company at the end of that oblique line of ownership: Intellectual Ventures, an "invention capital firm" or patent troll, depending on your views on innovation and intellectual … Read more

Here's a potentially noteworthy development in the patent litigation-riddled mobile device market.

The patent is No. 7,679,604, "Method and apparatus for controlling a computer system," and it describes motion control as a means of interacting with smartphones and the like.

The invention, the patent's authors explain, "facilitates an intuitive motion control of the application by physically manipulating the electronic device...it enables a user to intuitively control the state and/or displayed content of a computing device without the conventional need of pressing button(s), or manipulating a trackpad, trackball, etc. In this … Read more

As we predicted before the start of the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Sony used its press conference to formally announce the PS3 motion controller. Officially called the PlayStation Move, this wand-and-cam system, briefly demoed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo last year, is the latest move by a video game console maker into the realm of motion control.

While the Nintendo Wii has had this segment of the market cornered for some time, Microsoft is developing a camera-only motion control system for the Xbox 360 called Project Natal (still a working title), and is now officially joined by Sony in the console gesture control arms race.

As Microsoft demoed Project Natal for us in New York recently, and we've just had a chance to play with the PlayStation Move, we can now bring you our initial hands-on impressions of both systems.

PlayStation Move The PlayStation Move requires a combination of a Sony PlayStation Eye Web cam (an existing peripheral), plus one or more PlayStation Move wands. A secondary controller similar to the Nintendo Wii nunchuck, with the unfortunate name of the "subcontroller," is an optional accessory for some games.

We tried several games using the main Move controller (see the video above), and the experience was generally very close to what we're used to from the Nintendo Wii, albeit with a much greater sense of precision--even better than using the Wii Motion Plus. There was much less of the jittery movement to the onscreen cursor we're used to from the Wii.

At the same time, the experience was clearly a work in progress. We played a rail shooter called The Shoot, and while the aiming and shooting worked fairly well, we kept accidentally resetting the level because of overly sensitive pop-up menus. We also played Move Party, a collection of competitive mini-games for up to four players. Most of the mini-games worked well, from swatting flies to painting shapes on the screen, but the entire package felt too much like a retread of the original PlayStation EyeToy Webcam peripheral and games. A fighting game, using two Move controllers, had just enough input lag to feel sluggish.

Of course, these were all early demo versions of games, and they can be expected to undergo additional polishing before release. Our biggest concern is actually the hardware and how it will be sold.… Read more

While it lacks the bombast and sheer size of major technology trade shows such as CES and the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the annual Game Developers Conference has quietly become one of the most important events on gaming's calendar.

This relatively small conference, held in San Francisco, is where game designers and programmers, as well as publishers, developers, and the third-party technology companies they work with, come together for panels, classes, and keynotes. As the show has traditionally been (until a few years ago) largely under the press radar, you're just as likely to rub elbows with actual game … Read more

This week on preGAME, hosts Jeff Bakalar and Mark Licea take a look back at all of the big announcements from last week's Microsoft X10 conference in San Francisco. Today's show is chock-full of debut trailers, announcements, and first look game play video of some of 2010's most anticipated Xbox 360-centric games.

But before we get into the big announcements, we'll chat about the death of local multiplayer. Long gone are the days of local four-player split screen action like Goldeneye 64. Now more than ever, game developers are overlooking the game play element that defined the "party game." Why is this upsetting trend so popular? And why do game developers choose to leave it out?

All this plus the week's headlines and releases on preGAME!

Want to be a part of our live taping? Make sure you head to http://cnet.com/live/pregame every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern. If you missed any of the stories we talk about on today's preGAME, make sure to check out our links below.