Author Topic: Rumour: Sony plan to counter the Revolution (Read 7869 times)

Ian Sane · « **on:** February 24, 2006, 01:50:31 PM »

Gamespot has an article about a rumoured plan by Sony to combat the Rev by packaging the PS2 with the Eyetoy and their own remote style controller and selling it at a low price.

I think that's an interesting idea though it would kind of put the PS2 and PS3 in competition with each other. Unless Nintendo's plan to avoid the competition turns out to be true and then the PS2 and PS3 could just co-exist. It does show somewhat of a flaw in Nintendo's plan regarding sacrificing hardware for the low price. Why does this "weak" hardware at a low price have to be NEW hardware? Why couldn't Sony just do this?

And wouldn't these games thus work with the PS3 since the PS3 is backwards compatible? Ideally the PS3 should be able to use PS2 accessories though that's not a given (but there's a plenty of time to include such functionality prior to launch). If the PS3 did do this then Sony could have a mega-powered console that can also do the same things the Rev can. And for those willing to sacrifice cutting edge technology for a low price the option's there too.

It's all very interesting. One flaw I see in Sony's plan is that their attention will be split between the PS3 and PS2 while Nintendo can target all of their console related effort into just the Rev. Sony might not be able to give the PS2 enough effort to aggressively compete it against the Rev.

Zach · « **Reply #1 on:** February 24, 2006, 02:53:12 PM »

I think this rumor has been around for a long time, I remember a thread about it for a while back. The anonymous e-mailer from that article didnt leave any details, so this is all speculation but...

I am assuming that the eye toy controller would not have the same functionality of the rev controller. The sony controller would probably be something bright colored that the eye toy would pick up its position. In this case, it would be extremely diffiecult for this concept to be as accurate as the rev's controler (unless sony gets around nintendo's patent, and puts gyroscopes in the eye toy device). Picture this, you point the controller at the tv, then spin it on the Z axis (ie, left side goes up, right side goes down) The rev controller would have absolutely no problem picking this motion up, the eye toy's controller would have a lot more difficulty doing this.

Now lets say (hypothetically) that they eye toy device had the same funtionality of the rev (if its possible, extensive programming would be required). Nintendo is the one with the guts to actually push the controller as the concept behind the rev. Sony probably would go in the direction they are currently going, and promote graphics, the eye toy controller would take a back seat (much like the eye toy itself did, and we all know how that turned out). On the PS, the eye toy controller would probably be used to just make a few select probably not very good games. The only other reason for its existence would be for rev ports, in the latter case, for people to actually buy the eye toy controller, the rev, and its controller would have to be very successful, successful enough that the rev would actually still have a fighting chance, even if its controller is no longer original.

Dont get me wrong, Im not saying that an eye toy device would not be a threat, but I dont think sony is really in a position to push such a device as well as nintendo can.

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Why does this "weak" hardware at a low price have to be NEW hardware?

From what I see, the rev may be "weak" compared to the competion, but the way your saying it seems to mean that the rev will just be a repackaged gamecube with a new controller. I have full confidence that the rev will have much better graphics than the cube, its just that the graphics are not what nintendo is emphasizing. Graphics are not as important as they used to be when comparing a console, even the 360 doesnt have very much of a difference compared to this gen, especially if your not playing in HD.

Edit: Found it It wasnt really a rumor, just somebody supposing that it could happen.

Sir_Stabbalot · « **Reply #2 on:** February 24, 2006, 02:56:56 PM »

Meh. It would backfire in Sony's face. Anyone looking to buy a game system would know that the PS2 was last-gen and obsolete.

NinGurl69 *huggles · « **Reply #3 on:** February 24, 2006, 04:01:38 PM »

Soooo.............

You gotta buy a PS2/EyeToy pack, then buy a PS3............

........to enjoy EyeToyWandWaving action on the PS3 using EyeToyWandWaving PLAYSTATION 2 Games?

REDEFINING OF BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY (RETARDIBILITY)

KDR_11k · « **Reply #4 on:** February 24, 2006, 09:53:12 PM »

The PS3 has no PS2 connectors for controllers or memcards. In true Sony fashion they expect you to buy everything all over again with their new hardware revision (what other reason is there for the PS2 multitap not to work with the PS2-70000?).

Epitaph · « **Reply #5 on:** February 25, 2006, 07:35:33 AM »

If the ps3 has the computational power sony claims it would be possible to use the eyetoy to mimic the rev remote in some shape or form. They would need to seperated each end of the remote by either having 2 colors on each or some leds. The camera could then pick up this color patern and computer how you are orienting the remote. The problem is getting the ps3 processor to calculate this fast enough for it to be responsive and on top of that the eyetoy has to be able to see the controller well enough. If anyone has ever used face tracking software you would know how flawed it is.

Smash_Brother · « **Reply #6 on:** February 25, 2006, 11:12:35 AM »

It won't work.

Nintendo's controller is what it is because it's a true 3D point in space which can interface with the screen.

Imaging trying to play golf or baseball with the eye toy and a wand: you couldn't. The only games you could ever play with the damn thing would be games where the controller itself never left the field of view of the eye toy. You'd have to adapt to the controller's inherent weakness of not being able to leave the camera's point of view.

Also, the eye toy sucks. The only games available for the thing were some bad DDR adaptations and games where you could win with spastic flailing of your arms.

It's not the same as a Revmote and it never will be. There's a reason why Nintendo patented the hell out of the thing.

Zach · « **Reply #7 on:** February 25, 2006, 11:57:34 AM »

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Originally posted by: Smash_Brother
It's not the same as a Revmote and it never will be. There's a reason why Nintendo patented the hell out of the thing.

agreed about the fact that it wouldnt be the same as the rev remote. If the Rev is successful however, I would not be surprised if sony and ms found a way to copy the controller without technincally breaking nintendo's patents, they've done it many times before. I remember one of the nintendo execs (forget which one) saying that he fully expected the controller to be copied.

Smash_Brother · « **Reply #8 on:** February 25, 2006, 12:34:28 PM »

Yeah, I do expect that they'll figure out a way around it, but the patents will slow them down long enough that Nintendo will be able to do their damage in the marketplace before the other companies can copy them.

That's the job of the innovator: they push the market forward while everyone else anxiously awaits what they'll do next so they can copy it.

Microsoft has been doing this to Apple for years. They took Bill Gates' introduction video of Windows vista's new features and instead edited the footage so it looked like he was talking about Apple's OS X. Basically, the "new" features of vista rip off OS X just about word for word.

On the plus side, though, Apple ran away with the online music distribution market and now rules it with an iron fist so strong that Sony and MS together can't pose a threat.

There's a reason Nintendo is trying to emulate Apple and their strategies.

bustin98 · « **Reply #9 on:** February 25, 2006, 03:49:58 PM »

Another drawback to the eyetoy is the limits of visibilty. I like to play with a low level of lighting. Heck, even the 'normal' amount of lighting in my living room wasn't enough for the eye toy to 'see' consistently. At least with the Rev you can play in complete darkness if you wish.

Zach · « **Reply #10 on:** February 25, 2006, 04:15:45 PM »

Thats a good point, another limit of the visibility is that, say you walk out of the room, and sit in a different chair, would you have to get up again just to readjust the eye toy? Also, the controller would have to be a bright color, which aside from being kinda weird looking, the controller would be difficult to detect if there is something of a similar color behind it.

The biggest flaw that I see with a device like that (now that I have thought about it a little more) is that multi player would SUCK!!!! you would all have to be within the eye toy's range of visibiltity, so you couldnt spread out.

nemo_83 · « **Reply #11 on:** February 25, 2006, 04:23:20 PM »

I think it would make more sense if Sony ripped off the Revolution with the PS3 interface; though I doubt they can do the 3D or really anything other than pointer mechanics.

SgtShiversBen · « **Reply #12 on:** February 25, 2006, 06:23:02 PM »

Zach brings up a good point. The bar acknowledges the Rev controller in 3-D space right? Well sometimes I like to sit on the side of the couch or on the left side of the room becasue of glare. How exactly will the bar pick up where I'm sitting in relation to the bar?

Oh well, things like this will be addressed at E3.

Smash_Brother · « **Reply #13 on:** February 25, 2006, 06:34:30 PM »

Quote
Originally posted by: SgtShiversBen
Zach brings up a good point. The bar acknowledges the Rev controller in 3-D space right? Well sometimes I like to sit on the side of the couch or on the left side of the room becasue of glare. How exactly will the bar pick up where I'm sitting in relation to the bar?

Oh well, things like this will be addressed at E3.

Yeah, that's one which will we'll just have to wait and see with.

I assume the Revmote will have some limitations, but it must be able to do what we think it does to a worthwhile degree. Otherwise, Tecmo and other companies wouldn't be bringing out sports games which involve activities like swinging a golf club or baseball bat.

Quote
The biggest flaw that I see with a device like that (now that I have thought about it a little more) is that multi player would SUCK!!!! you would all have to be within the eye toy's range of visibiltity, so you couldnt spread out.

Yeah, that would definitely violate the personal space bubble of every player when four of them try to crowd into the eye toy's field of view.

Artimus · « **Reply #14 on:** February 25, 2006, 06:59:38 PM »

The Revolution doesn't know WHERE the controller is. What it can read is how the controller is moving. You can sit anywhere in the room you want, you can pause the game and move wherever you want to, there is no central axis. It's just like a mouse. Pickup the mouse, move it five feet over, and the cursor doesn't move.

wandering · « **Reply #15 on:** February 25, 2006, 07:56:38 PM »

The more I think about it, the more I think Nintendo's plan is brilliant.

First off, their controller is very hard to copy. The technology is complex and patented. And the design is such that you couldn't just slap it onto an existing controller like the ps3's and get nearly the same functionality.

Second off, they haven't shown it with games yet. Unlike with the n64, there is some uncertainity about how well it would work.

And third off, way more so than with the n64, games will have to be designed from the ground up to work with the rev controller.

Oh, and this rumored plan, bundling the sub-par eyetoy with an old system, is laughable. If that's ALL sony does, all they're doing is promoting the rev. Sony would basically be admitting that motion control is the future, without actually providing it in a good, well implemented way with their next-gen console.

NinGurl69 *huggles · « **Reply #16 on:** February 25, 2006, 08:05:58 PM »

Quote
Originally posted by: Artimus
The Revolution doesn't know WHERE the controller is. What it can read is how the controller is moving. You can sit anywhere in the room you want, you can pause the game and move wherever you want to, there is no central axis. It's just like a mouse. Pickup the mouse, move it five feet over, and the cursor doesn't move.

I imagine it DOES KNOW. The sensor bar provides an origin/reference, otherwise the lightgun/"point n shoot" mechanics in one of the E3 demos would not work (if it really was based on line-of-sight targeting). It's up to the individual software to CARE about location or not.

This ties in with that new "light gun" for PS2/Xbox that also uses sensor bars on the TV's sides. If it knows, say, where the front & back ends of the gun are 'in-space,' then it can calculate a line using those 2 points and extrapolate to determine where the line-of-fire meets the TV screen (specifically, the plane defined by the sensor bar). Rev has that, and more.

Zach · « **Reply #17 on:** February 25, 2006, 10:13:31 PM »

Quote
Originally posted by: SgtShiversBen
Zach brings up a good point. The bar acknowledges the Rev controller in 3-D space right? Well sometimes I like to sit on the side of the couch or on the left side of the room becasue of glare. How exactly will the bar pick up where I'm sitting in relation to the bar?

Oh well, things like this will be addressed at E3.

Thats not exactly what I was talking about, but that is a good point too. I was talking about the visibility of the eye toy, if you move to another chair, you would have to adjust the lense so that it is pointed at you.

guess I wasnt really clear about that.

Artimus · « **Reply #18 on:** February 26, 2006, 09:04:16 AM »

Quote
Originally posted by: Professional 666
Quote
Originally posted by: Artimus
The Revolution doesn't know WHERE the controller is. What it can read is how the controller is moving. You can sit anywhere in the room you want, you can pause the game and move wherever you want to, there is no central axis. It's just like a mouse. Pickup the mouse, move it five feet over, and the cursor doesn't move.

I imagine it DOES KNOW. The sensor bar provides an origin/reference, otherwise the lightgun/"point n shoot" mechanics in one of the E3 demos would not work (if it really was based on line-of-sight targeting). It's up to the individual software to CARE about location or not.

This ties in with that new "light gun" for PS2/Xbox that also uses sensor bars on the TV's sides. If it knows, say, where the front & back ends of the gun are 'in-space,' then it can calculate a line using those 2 points and extrapolate to determine where the line-of-fire meets the TV screen (specifically, the plane defined by the sensor bar). Rev has that, and more.

But the bars don't measure physical location. You'd have to totally redesign them for that to work.

Smash_Brother · « **Reply #19 on:** February 26, 2006, 10:03:10 AM »

I believe that gyroscopes used will only measure movement, but I can't be sure. There will have to be some way of setting the unit to "zero" the same way you do with an analogue stick.

For example, let's say I'm playing baseball with the Rev controller, using the controller as the handle of the bat. If the screen loads up and I'm holding the controller by my leg, when I move it the controller up to my shoulder, I'd think that the Rev would have to see that and assume I'm moving the bat up higher, making the on-screen player hold the bat over his head.

There should be a positional reset button of some kind, like Z2 or something, which tells the controller that it's at the point in space where you will be using the gyroscopes to make things happen on screen.

But that's just theory. Maybe the sensor CAN somehow tell where it is relative to the person holding it but if it can, it's using technology I'm unfamiliar with.

KDR_11k · « **Reply #20 on:** February 26, 2006, 10:12:09 AM »

They're accellerometers, they measure movement, yes. I think games that translate that movement to a position will allow you to recenter with the home button or use only rotation (that'd make the most sense since it'd account for individual differences and allow you to use it with minimal movement). Since it can tell where the TV is rotation wouldn't need recentering.

Ian Sane · « **Reply #21 on:** February 27, 2006, 06:20:13 AM »

I think it's a great point that due to the Eyetoy's limitations it would be a weak substitute for the Rev controller. But we don't really know exactly how the remote works. I'm assuming it works better than the Eyetoy because it would be, well, really sucky if it wasn't. I'm just logically assuming Nintendo has something more substantial than that. But we don't really have a lot of details on exactly how it works. We know of some bar thingy that's supposed to go on top of the TV but if you asked me what it looks like I couldn't tell you. Nintendo has never really talked about it. I think the only reason we even know about it is that IGN revealed it when they gave impressions.

I think we still need to know more about how the controller works. It's probably better than the Eyetoy but who knows what limitations it might have.

Smash_Brother · « **Reply #22 on:** February 27, 2006, 07:36:10 AM »

The fact that it uses a mechanism other than sight makes it better than the eye toy. Beyond that, who knows.

Artimus · « **Reply #23 on:** February 27, 2006, 12:06:54 PM »

Quote
Originally posted by: Ian Sane
I think it's a great point that due to the Eyetoy's limitations it would be a weak substitute for the Rev controller. But we don't really know exactly how the remote works. I'm assuming it works better than the Eyetoy because it would be, well, really sucky if it wasn't. I'm just logically assuming Nintendo has something more substantial than that. But we don't really have a lot of details on exactly how it works. We know of some bar thingy that's supposed to go on top of the TV but if you asked me what it looks like I couldn't tell you. Nintendo has never really talked about it. I think the only reason we even know about it is that IGN revealed it when they gave impressions.

I think we still need to know more about how the controller works. It's probably better than the Eyetoy but who knows what limitations it might have.

Sometimes I wonder if you actually read things or just go by what people say second hand.

NINTENDO has mentioned the censors before when asked.

Ian Sane · « **Reply #24 on:** February 27, 2006, 12:18:41 PM »

"Sometimes I wonder if you actually read things or just go by what people say second hand.

NINTENDO has mentioned the censors before when asked."

Ever thought that maybe I just don't remember that? I certainly have never seen any pictures of the thing, at least not like the crystal clear remote pictures we've seen. How does the censor bar work? Where do we have to put it? How do you set it? Are there any limitations regarding distance? How does it work regarding multiplayer? What if other people are playing Rev in a nearby room? Would that cause any interference? Does each remote need a bar? These are important questions and we don't know the answer to them yet.

Plus I never even heard of the bar until at least a few days after the announcement. Okay Nintendo has mentioned them when asked but the key thing is "when asked". They did not go into any details until the press brought it up.

News:

Author Topic: Rumour: Sony plan to counter the Revolution (Read 7869 times)