Even with all the excitement and splendor of a fully equipped Sony marketing shinding, it was a bit hard to get too excited about the PlayStation Move. Unless you've been living in Siberia under the permafrost you've almost certainly seen the Nintendo Wii and its revolutionary controller system that has resulted in just mind-bogglingly incredible sales.

Sony have clearly taken a page out of the Nintendo playbook here; the device looks a lot like the Wii controller and obviously does a bunch of the same things. So rather than waste your cranial capacity talking about the things it does similarly, I'll recap some of the highlights of the presentation and the following hands-on we got afterward.



Two words that came up repeatedly were "accuracy" and "precision". In fact, these came up so often that I started feeling like they thought I was a little stupid, but I guess they really wanted to highlight this feature - possibly thinking I wouldn't buy into the fact that they were calling this a "revolutionary" product, which is what they said at the start of the presentation.

I was intrigued as to how big a deal the precision was - in the presentation it wasn't immediately clear that it made any difference. One of the specific games though showed some of the magic though - using the EyeToy camera, you can be playing a game and it has the ability to replace the Move controller with a digital object. This was so perfectly done that when it first came up on the big screen, I actually thought I'd missed something and the presented was holding a different object.

I was intrigued by this and after the main presentation bailed up one of the Sony guys in the corner - the guy with the smallest crowd around him, because he had the perhaps non-enviable job of having the technical demo station, not actually running one of the games. This was perfect for me because I got to drill him about some of the magic and not feel guilty that I was stopping some other random journalist from washing his EyePet (I actually saw someone doing this with the new controller).



The reason they can do things like seamless object replacements is largely to do with the enhanced systems they have in place to provide this extra accuracy and precision. Even small discrepancies in things like the positioning of the object in the displayed person's hand, or the angle it is facing relative to their body, can create visual cues that something Just Isn't Right, and the brain picks up on that instantly.

The Move uses similar internals to the WiiMote system - accelerometers doing stuff inside the controls and reporting back to the system where the data is collected, analysed, and turned into digital enjoyment on screen. However, the Move has one extra advantage - the big glowing ball on the end of the controller, which the EyeToy camera uses as another frame of reference. This extra level of detail is munged into the already-huge volume of positioning and movement data, providing enhanced support for things like depth perception.

The system's usual latency is around the 22ms mark - meaning your physical movements are translated pretty quickly into on screen actions. I gave this a bit of a thrashing, wiggling the device around as fast as I could - and I noticed that it seemed a bit laggy and a delay. I mentioned this to the Sony dude, who promptly dropped into the calibration thing, pressed a few buttons, gave it back to me and said "try again" - and bam, it was working perfectly (apparently the crowded environs of a press event with people walking everywhere in the background, messing with various settings, and the fact that it's still in development combine to make it a non-optimal environment requiring occasional recalibration).



I also saw the ability to change the latency - right down to zero milliseconds (which provides a completely instant response, but it's a little more erratic and jerky as every move in your hand is translated directly) up to around 150 milliseconds, giving it a bit more of a moving-through-molasses feel to it. This option exists to give the game developers a bit more leeway in the control system (and it's easy to imagine various gameplay mechanics being developed around it as well - have your character drink too many beers, for example, and you could easily artificially decrease the response time).

The sheer accuracy of the controller resolution is definitely noticable, and you really feel like you have near-total control over the device. I was wracking my brain trying to compare it to the Wii, but the video resolution is so different I could never be sure if I was comparing apples with apples, so I can't really make a judgment call on that.

The device itself was surprisingly light, which is pretty important if you're going to be waving it around a lot. The Rudolph-the-Reindeer-esque ball on the end of the device doesn't add significantly to the weight (neat fact: the different colour is able to be set in software, so you can set it to whatever you want). It has a pressure sensitive trigger, but aside from that it's pretty much like you'd imagine.



Apparently it is trivial to ensure upcoming games - even if they're not specifically intended to be played with the Move - will be playable with the Move, so no doubt we'll see a bunch of titles that have bare bones support, but the key factor will (of course) be the games. The titles shown today were a bit rough and raw, but demonstrated some of the key concepts and ideas that they feel will work well - hopefully they'll be fleshed out and enough to attract interest at launch time.

Overall it looks like a good entry into the market for Sony. The US$100 price point for the main controller, plus EyeToy camera, plus one game sounds about right to entice people into buying it, though I'd prefer if it came with the mini-controller as well. Sony seem to think that the migration of people from a "Wii household" to a "Move household" is a natural progression, especially as more people buy HD TVs and want a better visual experience, so it will be interesting to see if they're correct!

Some more photos below:












These two don't really give a good idea of the accuracy of the detection; the electric shaver she's holding in her hand has tiny differences in position, but it's really noticable when you're actually holding the controller.