Sony: hands-free motion tech not viable

It feels 'awkward' not holding something in your hand.

Sony dismissed the idea of adopting hands-free motion controls - similar to that of Microsoft's Kinect - because the technology felt awkward to use, Sony's senior researcher Richard Marks has told VideoGamer.com.

At a PlayStation move technology showcase last week, Marks revealed that Sony did look into hands-free tech using a 3D camera, but it simply didn't feel right.

"We did as much as we could with just a camera: that was my focus. But we kept running into problems, you couldn't do all the experiences we wanted to do and also around that time DualShock was coming out for PlayStation 3, it had built-in censors and gyros that gave different kinds of information about rotation, whereas the camera could give a lot of position information.

"So combining the two made a lot of sense. And also the big other factor that we were realising at the time was that it feels good to have something in your hand for a lot of games. It's not just that it gives you more input capability, which it does. But also it just feels right. Like if you have a tennis racket it feels better to have a controller in your hand. If you have a magic wand, a sword, a gun, it all feels better."

Marks continued: "We were very interested [in losing the remote] in 2004. But then we just decided it wasn't a viable product in our minds. EyeToy can already do a lot of that already. We hit a lot of the same limits with the 3D camera that we had hit with EyeToy so it didn't seem like it added enough value.

"I had demonstrations with the 3D camera where you're just casting spells or drawing. Doing it with your fingers is kind of neat but in the end it feels awkward. I would often just pick up a stick and it felt better."

In the end Marks and his team realised there was no need to drop the handheld controller, so long as it remained quite simple to use.

"[The controller] was easy to use, you could get all the benefits of having buttons. But we could also have all the benefits of tracking the controller with a camera, and that's when we basically started the productisation of Move," he said.

PlayStation Move is scheduled for release across Europe on September 15, 2010. You'll find the full interview with Richard Marks right here.