Tech Focus: What Next for Motion Control?

The challenge facing Nintendo is that the tablet interface is somewhat more complex and not nearly as immediate a proposition as the Wiimote was in its day. But it is clearly a highly versatile proposition and it's up to the company and third party publishers to transform some of the various Wii U concept work we saw demonstrated at last year's E3 into exciting, fresh and original gameplay.

"Kinect is a work-in-progress; marketed as a standalone platform and one that will expand and evolve alongside the Xbox brand."

While motion control strategy is still up in the air with Microsoft's next-gen hardware, details and rumours are starting to emerge. Unsubstantiated stories emerged last week that the console itself will fit into a tablet-style controller, but this is entirely at odds with basic logic - cramming next-gen silicon into a tablet aimed at a price-conscious mainstream audience simply isn't a viable proposition, for all the same reasons (and then some) that those wishing for a true next-gen leap for Wii U's graphical capabilities are likely to be disappointed.

Worthy of far more consideration are the reports that Kinect will ship as standard as part of the next-gen Xbox, perhaps in two SKUs: the first, a set-top box, the second a fully fledged core-gamer orientated console. These rumours carry considerably more weight bearing in mind that Microsoft apparently held a consultation with developers on the form and function of Kinect 2 at an event hosted at Disneyland in Los Angeles after E3 last year, and appears almost obvious bearing in mind that the platform holder has worked hard in establishing Kinect as a standalone platform, one that will expand and evolve alongside the Xbox brand.

In terms of how Microsoft can evolve the hardware, it doesn't take a genius to evaluate the current system's limitations and suggest some alternatives in overcoming them. Latency is one of the major issues that holds back the kinds of games in which Kinect can be utilised.

Developers have made some strides in overcoming this issue, firstly by devising their own ways of utilising the z-cam's depth data, specifically when it comes to re-mapping it onto in-game characters. It's generally believed that Microsoft's own libraries only re-map the human form scanned by Kinect onto its own Avatars using a computationally expensive skeletal model, and developers have adopted their own tech to do the same job more quickly, at the expense of the kind of flexibility Microsoft's libraries offer. But the real solution here will be hardware-based, and that means binning off the USB interface for something faster and with more bandwidth on tap. Resolving this issue also addresses another limitation - the ability to stream real-time video with Kinect data simultaneously - something that the PC version has no problem with owing to a superior USB 2.0 spec implementation.

The second issue is one of precision. In the past couple of years, various claims have been made with regards the detail the Kinect cameras are able to resolve, in particular when it comes to the hands and fingers. Kinect titles have concentrated mostly on major body movement, and precise movements with the hands and fingers have not been possible to track effectively - hence the overly strange Ghost Recon performance we saw at the Microsoft E3 presser last year. By the time the next-gen comes around, upgrading to higher precision cameras, perhaps even with a 60Hz refresh, should be possible.

Perhaps the most exciting element behind a bundled Kinect is the fact that developers can address the hardware knowing that everyone owns it - utilisation of functionality should hopefully be a little more fully featured than some of the implementations we've seen in Xbox 360 core titles, and hybrid control systems using both pad and camera could be intriguing. A hefty reliance on Kinect tech would make streaming gameplay via Cloud a lot more difficult though, and it's widely believed that Microsoft is investigating online streaming - beaming inputs (even motion controllers) over the internet would be simple enough, but the upstream bandwidth just isn't there to sustain two camera feeds and the audio from a multi-array mix.

So if Nintendo has revealed its hand and we can make a lot of educated guesses about where Microsoft is headed, where does that leave Sony? Of all the platform holders, very little indeed is known about the successor to PlayStation 3, least of all the technical make-up of its control system. But of the three major console-makers, historically it has been the most conservative, effectively sitting upon the innovations brought forth by Dr Richard Marks' team, iterations of which have gone on to perform so well for Sony's competitors. Will we once again see the standard dual shock bundled with its next console, a reworked PlayStation Move, or something all-new from Marks' labs? I can't wait to find out...