14 DAY TRIAL // Sony's lead engineer on the PlayStation move, Anton Mikhailov, has just gone on the offensive against Microsoft's own motion detection peripheral, the Kinect, saying that it is filled with technological problems.
Mikhailov also picked on Kinect last week, when it said that the Star Wars lightsaber game for the PlayStation Move would be much better than the one for the Kinect.
Now, the engineer goes into more technical details, and picks on the motion detection camera in the Kinect, which only sees at 30 frames per second, as opposed to the 60 fps performance of the PlayStation Eye camera, used by the Move.
"We're not necessarily against Kinect or against depth cameras, it's just we feel like Move has more applicability across more genres so it fits better with what we try to do," he revealed.
"Also I think the tech is a bit, not so much immature, but not quite up to spec in what we think. Like the PlayStation Eye camera runs at 60 frames per second so it can track you very quickly whereas the Kinect and other depth camera are only 30 frames per second. So they are more suited for slower motions."
The engineer goes on to say that dancing or experiences that don't require quick movements are recommended if you want the Kinect to accurately record movements, and that fighting or jumping aren't really up the peripheral's alley.
"Dancing is still kind of okay and then the yoga stuff that they were doing, it fits that very well, whereas if you want to do quick punches it's harder to do that just because you can't see the player as quickly. And there’s more latency, things like that. So you know, it's not a particularly [great] result, it's just mostly technological problems."
He goes on "We thought that they were just minor, well not so much minor. Marketing-wise they're minor tech problems, technologically-wise they're quite big."
Last but not least, the Sony executive revealed that while the Kinect drained around 10 to 15% from the power of the Xbox 360, the Move only needed just 1% of the PS3, meaning high end games, like Killzone 3, can use it without needing to worry about cutting back on their own graphics power.