Controllers with a 3D camera delivers ”more precision” which is critical for ”hardcore” titles. Marks doesn’t want to ”wave to click a button.” Fight!
“I’m a heavy proponent of 3D cameras. I think they’re really interesting technology,” Marks said to Digital Foundry in an interview.
”I’m not a big fan of gestures myself. There is a place for them in certain types of game but I think the worst thing is that you need to do all this kind of “stuff” and it’s the equivalent of one button press. You’ve replaced that one button with all of that?”
”I don’t want to just be harsh about gestures. My favourite use of them would be something like this: imagine you’re casting a spell by drawing in the air and how well you draw it matters to the spell strength. Then it actually starts to have a meaning.”
Microsoft has lauded Kinect as removing a ‘final barrier’ between the gamer and the game, but Sony is of the thinking it actually makes certain things worse.
“We had many different 3D camera prototypes and we had our game teams look into that to evaluate what they could do with it. There are some experiences that it can do that are really neat but there just weren’t enough experiences that made it make enough sense as a platform-level controller,” continued the Sony Europe man.
“Coming back is that sometimes we need buttons to have certain kinds of experiences. Other times we need more precision than we can get out of those cameras. We need to know exactly what you’re doing with your hands, especially in the more hardcore experiences.” This has been one area of major discussion - the FPS genre.
So will Kinect actually impose new limits on the gamer? ”If it’s just that 3D camera, yeah I guess,” he said. “That’s what we ran into with EyeToy. When you have only the camera, it’s a magical feeling but sometimes you just wish you could select something.”
“I don’t want to wave to click a button.” Do you agree with Marks, videogamer? Check out the full tech interview between Richard Marks and Digital Foundry.
