Sony patents new motion-sensing techAt the 2005 Tokyo Game Show, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata debuted the Wii Remote and Nunchuk to much fanfare and intrigue. Not a year later, former Sony execs Ken Kutaragi and Phil Harrison used Sony's E3 2006 stage to reveal the game maker's own motion-sensing controller, later dubbed the Sixaxis. However, rather than the universal interest that greeted its contemporary, Sony's device quickly drew fire as an "us too" peripheral that was as much of a surprise to the development community as it was to gamers.While Sony has since distanced itself from the Sixaxis, the motion-sensing tech, along with rumble support, returned with the controller's successor, the DualShock 3. Now, it appears as if Sony has further plans to iterate on its visceral input device. Recently, Sony Computer Entertainment of America's patent application for a new input device emerged in the US Patent and Trademark Office's online database. The application, which was first filed in June, details a new motion-sensing controller whose most distinguishing feature is its ability to break apart and be put back together in a variety of formations. The patent application also details a "hybrid video capture and ultrasonic tracking system" to deal with motion-sensing. Detailing the need for the sound component of the tracking system, Sony's patent application reads: "Current object tracking suffers in capture accuracy. This problem arises because conventional image analysis can only produce somewhat reliable measurements of the location of the user in two dimensions...Broadly speaking, the present invention fills these needs by providing methods and systems for establishing communication between a computer program in a computing system and a controller to be held by a user in order to determine the three-dimensional location of the controller." Tags: Patent Application, Sony Corp., video capture, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. |
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