Tech Interview: PlayStation Move

Our team has been really focused on the Move only so far but some of the game teams have been combining 3D and Move. Just last week we got a 3DTV into our area, just because we were coming to E3 and we wanted to make some new demonstrations. It's really, really crazy how it feels when you combine Move with the 3D television. Most of the games for 3D so far are "flying through" games and that's a really strong 3D feeling but another kind of experience is a diorama experience.

So there's like a virtual diorama or dollhouse. With the Move you can actually reach into that wherever you want and move around, it's such a compelling feeling. It feels like it's right there. Then we tried that same demonstration with a 2D display and it's really hard. Shadows can help you...

We've done things like attach a light to the Move, so the lighting changes as you move the controller. Not only do you get the shadows, but the light moves with it. There are a lot of tricks that people will come up with in how to give a more 3D feeling with only a 2D display, but 3D really is like a Holy Grail. The ultimate demonstration which I didn't have time to complete last week is to combine the head-tracking and the Move with 3D. It's like a holographic experience. Now you can look around, now you can look behind things, reach in there, grab that.

Right now we've been acting very much like a dev support team since we made the software. But it's pretty much got to the point now where the actual dev support team understand everything we understand. We help teams now mostly doing something new. So there's a data layer and there's an interpretation layer... if they're interpreting the data in a new way that hasn't been done before then we're interested in helping them and understanding what they're doing. But if it's something like pointing and shooting, that's pretty well established. Third parties don't need any help, we have sample code for that.

Then that's where we'll get involved. Actually the teams have been really good. I think the developers have been really shocked when they get the source code, the SDK. It comes out with position and rotation. That's just it. That's the answer. That's the way it should be. It's very simple.

Right, and we have another tool from the dev support team that broadcasts the data across the network from the Move, so you can send it to a PC. You can wrap a prototype on PC, or Flash or anything like that and still use the Move.

Our artists actually have a plug-in for Maya where they can do some content creation things in Maya in 3D. We actually have a new demo here for content creation... [starts using Move demo on a nearby PS3]. This is like a 3D modelling demonstration. You can spin this object like a lathe and I can carve away on it. So for content creation, you have the tool in one hand and the object in the other. It's super-natural what you do with it. You don't have to think. This is what our artists are excited about.

Spatial input on a PC is a little bit tricky. For effectiveness they can flip into 2D and have 2D views for everything but for "naturalness" Maya isn't super-intuitive though it is effective. With content creation for the average person, this kind of UI can be used by any one but a complex modelling package... not many people can use that.

Yeah, we actually have this demo running in 3D. All these demos can be moved to 3D very easily. The multi-touch demo you saw on Engadget, that looks really neat in 3D also.

Battery life is about 10 hours when it's fully charged and obviously that changes depending on how much rumble is happening, how bright the light is; the light adjusts to the room lighting. It charges from USB and we've just announced the charger. It's pretty cool... Move snaps in, standing up.

We've been asked that before. As a group we make the demos to create an impact, to explain a concept but we don't run them through QA the way you would with a game. We've been wrestling with it: if you give these things to people and they crash, there's a certain level of people that'll be OK with that because we're giving them things they wouldn't have otherwise. But there's another level of person that wouldn't be happy that Sony has something out there that crashes. That's bad.

It's a tough call. I'd love to share these things with people. We work with them and they're neat. Some of them are really powerful, visceral experiences. But some of the game teams would rather we didn't share them because they'd like to use the concepts in their games and be the first ones to do so...