RobertoOrtiz
11-20-2006, 08:42 PM
Quote:
"With a tilt of your wrists, the dragon you're riding dives toward the water below. With another movement of your hands, as if pulling back on imaginary reins, the scaly beast pulls out of the dive into level flight, flapping its wings.
That's how the unreleased game "Lair" will work on the Sony PlayStation 3, which launched in the U.S. on Friday. Like Nintendo Co.'s Wii console, which went on sale two days later, it uses a motion-sensitive controller in an effort to make games more intuitive to play.
The controllers make a higher level of realism possible, too: in the sports game bundled with the Wii in the U.S., the stick-shaped controller doubles as the handle of a virtual tennis racket or golf club.
The technology behind motion-sensing has been around for a while, but recent technical advances have radically brought down the price -- and the size. The new game controllers are the first gadgets that promise to bring the technology into the hands of millions of people, and manufacturers are now using motion sensors in other consumer products, including cell phones.
The technology is a wonder of miniaturization and precision. Here's how Benedetto Vigna, head of the unit at Switzerland-based STMicroelectronics NV, which makes a motion-sensing chip for Nintendo, explains how it works:
When you wave around the new Nintendo controller, two tiny, flat pieces of silicon inside it, each weighing about a millionth of a gram, flex against silicon springs that hold them in place.
The movements are minute, or to put it another way, they're on the scale of 10 to 100 hydrogen atoms stacked side by side.
"
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/fun.games/11/20/console.controller.ap/index.html
-R
"With a tilt of your wrists, the dragon you're riding dives toward the water below. With another movement of your hands, as if pulling back on imaginary reins, the scaly beast pulls out of the dive into level flight, flapping its wings.
That's how the unreleased game "Lair" will work on the Sony PlayStation 3, which launched in the U.S. on Friday. Like Nintendo Co.'s Wii console, which went on sale two days later, it uses a motion-sensitive controller in an effort to make games more intuitive to play.
The controllers make a higher level of realism possible, too: in the sports game bundled with the Wii in the U.S., the stick-shaped controller doubles as the handle of a virtual tennis racket or golf club.
The technology behind motion-sensing has been around for a while, but recent technical advances have radically brought down the price -- and the size. The new game controllers are the first gadgets that promise to bring the technology into the hands of millions of people, and manufacturers are now using motion sensors in other consumer products, including cell phones.
The technology is a wonder of miniaturization and precision. Here's how Benedetto Vigna, head of the unit at Switzerland-based STMicroelectronics NV, which makes a motion-sensing chip for Nintendo, explains how it works:
When you wave around the new Nintendo controller, two tiny, flat pieces of silicon inside it, each weighing about a millionth of a gram, flex against silicon springs that hold them in place.
The movements are minute, or to put it another way, they're on the scale of 10 to 100 hydrogen atoms stacked side by side.
"
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/fun.games/11/20/console.controller.ap/index.html
-R