
Kinect vs. PlayStation Move vs. Wii: Motion-Control Showdown - evo_9
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372244,00.asp
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electromagnetic
I worked as an actual games reviewer a few years ago, before leaving to focus
my spare time on becoming a novelist. Game reviewing was rather thankless work
(but that is rather off topic for now).

Wii: The Wii Controller allows us great control whilst allowing us the full
control of still having access to all our regular keys and analog sticks,
giving us the familiarity and allowing a wide range of actions to be
controlled.

Move: I'm a mature adult male and I would feel more comfortable waving an
oversized dildo about in a downtown high street than playing a game with a
luminescent ball on a stick. Beyond that, the Move limits the user immensely
by requiring them to set aside their actual controller. The advantage is that
you can use two controllers, which doesn't give any advantage over the Wii in
motion control but allows both to be tracked by the Eye. The disadvantage is
that a game requiring 2 controllers means only 2 players.

Kinect: This is the most technologically advanced of the three and also one-
ups the other two by using voice recognition software. The processing is only
partially on the 360. Furthermore it allows for the motion-control and voice
recognition to be used in combination with a controller. Simply the voice
recognition could be very useful in lots of games, especially in RPG's like
Mass Effect or Dragon Age to allow switching of weapon sets without requiring
menu access, and I'm sure developers will come up with my ingenious ideas than
just that.

In 3rd place is Move mostly for the crappy design but also cause of the
restricted playability; 2nd place is Wii, mostly because the potential has
still yet to be tapped by developers, but the controller is rather cumbersome
when games inevitably end up being your standard analog stick and trigger
affair. 1st place is Kinect, because at worst you still have a usable
controller whilst playing. At best you have motion tracking, voice recognition
and a controller. Providing either the motion tracking or the voice
recognition get well used, it's still going to be kicking the other two's
asses in terms of changing the market.

However, as always time will tell. Kinect may not live up to any of its
potential, but right now it stands to go much further than the other two in
revolutionizing gameplay. Move right now shows me nothing new, but is far
worse design and implementation than the Wii or Kinect.

~~~
bryanlarsen
tl;dr: most accurate system is last because it looks silly. least accurate
system is the best because it uses the "most advanced technology".

~~~
electromagnetic
Actually the Move has poor accuracy over distance. This is similar to when the
Wii complains "move closer to the screen" when you're only 20ft away and the
cursor starts jumping around.

I fail to see how the Kinect is the 'least accurate' when it can actively
track peoples fingers. All other systems are tracking one object, whilst the
Kinect can track each individual finger on two people's hands - meaning 20
distinct objects.

The advantage of the Kinect is that I'll actually be able to use it in my
living room without having to stand in the middle of the room because it's
allegedly accurate over 50ft not the pathetic upper limit of ~20ft with the
Wii (I've heard similar distance limits for the Move).

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liuliu
I am quite surprised to see the final Kinect depth-sensing technology utilized
two camera. The company Microsoft acquired (if I remembered correctly) is
known as maker of cheap 3D depth-sensing camera which itself is a very
interesting piece of technology (from what I understand, the technology uses
an active camera which emit infra-red and detect it at the same time, thus,
you can construct depth information from the structured infra-red reflection).
I am interested to know what obstacle they have encountered with that
technology.

~~~
kenjackson
I think the Kinect depth-sensing just uses one camera. But I think they use
the RGB camera for facial recognition, to get textures (to texture map your
image over your 3D body), and to do some additional disambiguation.

But for the depth-sensing, I _think_ they just use the one sensor.

~~~
liuliu
Yes, you are right, after a closer look at the image: <http://guide-
images.ifixit.net/igi/eORRRALtniStOpl3.huge>

I think that it confused me because the camera we use in lab have IR projector
embedded in the camera already.

