Move Designers Detail Controller Development

Speaking in Japanese magazine Famitsu, a couple of the designers of the PlayStation Move have been talking about the production and design of Sony’s motion control system.

Yoshio Miyazaki told Famitsu that he underestimated how difficult motion control is to work with. “It’s a simple matter to get a reading from a sensor and send it to the PS3 host, but the sensor readings can change depending on temperature and other environmental conditions. The question became how to keep the sensor readings as consistent as possible in a wide variety of environments, and that was very tricky. The problem was solved partly through hardware, but we were also lucky enough to have the developers of the software driver tune up their code to the very limits,” he said.

1up notes that initially, the idea came from with Richard Marks, who works in Sony’s R&D department, who then gave it to Miyazaki and SCE president Shuhei Yoshida. Their job was to get the technology into an actual manufacturable and saleable product. “Richard made his prototype with nothing but off-the-shelf parts, so the sphere on it was actually a ping-pong ball, [The real one] is made of silicon rubber, the same material used to make the pacifiers on baby bottles,” said Miyazaki.

Yoshida said that “unless we could keep the motion controller, PlayStation Eye and software below 10,000 yen as a set, it wouldn’t have a chance of selling. We based our calculations for the cost of the motion controller off that, and Miyazaki’s first response to that number was ‘we can’t make it.’”

“The designer told me that he has never been involved with a project that had so many revisions to it before now,” said Yoshida.

Ignoring the obvious PR, it’s quite an interesting story and I’d certainly like to know more about the general design process that goes behind the scenes of consoles and other technologies.

As for Move (which I’ve now got) I’m impressed by the technology, but I can’t say the games do anything for me. Sitting on the floor stroking an on-screen pet or playing table tennis isn’t really my idea of fun. Yet, the tracking is impressive, especially in games like Tumble. I’ll probably have a better impressions up soon but right now I’m looking to the future releases that’ll maybe make it worth it. I’ve just kind of had my fill of pretending to play sports in my living room, you know?